


for once, then, something

by Wallyallens



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Food, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 05:09:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11029296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallyallens/pseuds/Wallyallens
Summary: Robbie Reyes is an amazing cook, and Daisy considers ordering pizza cooking. Or, the way to Quake's heart is through her stomach.





	for once, then, something

Robbie comes back on a Thursday afternoon in August. It’s just a normal day at the base until the sparks begin, signalling the opening of a portal, and a pair of terrified interns try to put it out with a fire extinguisher. When that fails, they go running for the director.

There’s a hard rain falling outside and Daisy is four cups of coffee into the day and up to her eyeballs in bureaucratic bullshit. It turned out that rebuilding a spy agency from scratch was harder than Coulson made it look; after waking up in custody and facing a trial for murder, as the government were less than amenable to the truth that ‘robots did it’, she had clawed her way through the red tape with her team and scraped SHIELD back together. Bricks and bones of a long-lost ideal were all that remained. The remnants from the bus were few and far between: but they had the plane, the base, and enough good people left to try. And they did their best, campaigning for inhuman rights, saving lives, fighting the bad guys just like always, but Daisy was left with a permanent foggy headache that never seemed to fade since she had taken on the role of director.

It hadn’t been an easy decision to make, but after six months and no sign of Coulson, somebody had to step into the shadow. It looked good to have a real inhuman leader after Mace’s deception, she was told. People looked to her for answers, she was told. SHIELD needed a leader, she was told. It wasn’t until May had sought her out to spar and spoke in between thoroughly kicking Daisy’s ass, saying that Coulson had been training Daisy to be his replacement for years and it didn’t matter if she had never organised more than a party before, that Daisy had the heart of SHIELD beating between her ribs and that was enough; it really wasn’t until that moment that she even considered the possibility of taking the position.

“It doesn’t mean giving up on him,” May had finished. Glistening in her dark eyes was a pain sharp and keen as a blade’s edge, even after months, but she nodded at the same time. “I’m certainly not. But Coulson would want us to carry on. He’d want to come home, to SHIELD, not just get back.”

After several shitty beers and spending all night talking to Jemma, Daisy had finally agreed to become the director. Not a lot changed after that – she got a new badge and an itinerary of meetings with suits that blurred into one another, as the full weight of leadership fell onto her back.

It was a good kind of pain, though. Not the empty absence of emotion from after Lincoln, the dull pain, but a _burn_. Almost all of the time, she was tired or had a headache or struggled to deal with the pure stream of problems that constituted a day at the head of SHIELD. It was a burn that settled into her bones and lined the bags under her eyes as she forced more smiles than she thought she had left in her; all screaming that she was **alive**. After a while, like muscles exercised, the burn got less and she saw how she had changed for it – the smile on her face was stronger than before, and when people turned to her for answers something warm bloomed inside her chest.

So the headache that accompanies her down the corridor, buzzing just behind her eyes as she dismisses the interns and makes her way to the portal was annoying but not the worst thing that could have happened. In fact, this was a good day. Anyone coming home after such a long time was hopeful news: the headache was erased slightly at the thought of seeing her friend again, and her steps when they clicked against the floors were chipper.

 _Robbie was coming back_.

When she arrives, he is just stepping from the portal, the swirling sparks encircling him like a skewed halo. That was Robbie all over, she supposed. A heart that was good at it’s very core, beating with love for his brother but leaving none for himself, but it was love that scorched; it burned in rage, it burned in joy, and he was too much and too messy and too hollowed out on the inside to be an angel. All that fire inside of him left nothing but a blackened-out husk and an aftertaste of gasoline. So the portal burned like a halo, that much was true, but it burned red, almost as brightly as he did; tainting everything it touched with its light. It set the freckles scattered across his cheeks on fire, just catching his eyes in their warmth before, like embers kicked from a stamped-out fire, the light died, the portal fading to leave just a man in its wake.

Even without the fire, he was a spark alone – same jacket, same chain wrapped around his shoulders, same worn-in twist on his lips, Robbie blinked around at the room he had arrived in, wincing at the harshness of the artificial lights overhead.

Then his eyes found her, and that little smile deepened.

“Hi honey,” Daisy joked, feeling her own face twist to match his in amusement. “Did you have a nice trip?”

When he laughed, it was always quietly. It surprised her every time –

Mack laughed loudly, like rumbling thunder. It was a belly-laugh, true and bold. It shook the room. It made things seem bigger, as it boomed down the corridors and welcomed you in; it was a laugh that begged to be shared, that invited, honest at its core; his laughter encircled all the world within it –

Jemma laughed unexpectedly. She was reserved by nature, clinical in approach, and it was only when caught off-duty and by surprise that she allowed herself to laugh – less so these days, and it was a sound Daisy had missed, as it was one of the things that had made the Bus seem like home all those years ago – but it was so light when she did laugh, so pure and high and British in a way nobody could quite explain. Above all else, it was _infectious_ –

Fitz snorted. There was no way around it. When prompted to a joke, he snorted; sniggered, made small sounds that were not subdued but simply what they were; it wasn’t that he was holding back laughter, or that he was particularly against it – he just snorted laughs instead of giving loud laughter; it was how he was, filling the space without needing to shatter the quiet –

May was . . . hard to make laugh. And Daisy had tried more than enough times. But actual laughter was a hard feat – May smiled, the assured little twist of her lips that felt _earned_ when it made an appearance, which from May was just as special as laughter, which felt like something more – it was easy to miss it when she laughed. It was soft, gentle, mingling in with the laughter of the crowd –

Elena was more like Mack in laughter, and when the two of them were together, it rang out so strongly it was almost enough to blow you away. Her laughter was low in her throat, raspy in a way that was almost melodic and usually wrapped within a smirk that was two parts teasing and one part genuine joy at life. Elena laughed like the future was a challenge she was rising to meet -

Coulson chuckled, like the old man from a 1950’s sitcom that he was in his soul. He laughed at his own jokes more often than not. It was one of the most endearing things about him; the chuckle worked its way out in breaths, earnest, simple laughter, and he never held it back. She had wondered once if he laughed so much because he had died, and it was ridiculous to deny yourself the simple pleasure of laughing after that –

Which led her right back to Robbie Reyes, standing in front of her with hands shoved deep into his pockets, rocking on his heels, soft laughter leaving him in a breath while his shoulders shook. It was so quiet, but even if the sound leaving his lips was weak, his eyes laughed loudly enough to make up for it. They glinted with past laughter, bold and bright – in the lines around his eyes and mouth, and the way his eyes shone with amusement, Daisy could see how Robbie might have laughed years ago with his brother: honest, open, before the shadow of the Rider muted the roaring to a sound like a sigh.

Still, a fragment of that loudness remained, and it was shining when he looked at her, lips twitching up into a grin with a flash of teeth, gone in a second.

“Eh, you know,” he replies, tilting his head to one side. Robbie shrugs, rolling with the limp joke, matching it with a half-smile. “It was no Disneyland. And the traffic was a nightmare – sorry I’m late.”

And besides herself, and the weight she could see on his shoulders and feel on her own, Daisy gave her own weak laugh at that, covering her mouth with her hand. It was a habit she had always had, but the laughter behind it wasn’t what it used to be, she thought, however it was real enough through cracked lips as she took a few steps closer to him, placing a hand on Robbie’s shoulder.

“You’re right on time.”

His brow furrows immediately, eyebrows drawing together in concern. “Trouble?”

“The world’s not ending – for once - if that’s what you mean,” she replies, shaking her head lightly. It wasn’t unfair of Robbie to assume there would be trouble – it seemed to follow in her footsteps. “But it is SHIELD; there’s always something happening, good or bad. I just meant-”And then she pauses. Biting her lip, she looks at him without the barrier of sarcasm. Assessing the shadows in his face, darker than her own, and the way the hands inside of his pockets were clenched into fists, she nods once, finishing in a softer tone. “It’s good to see you again, Robbie.”

There was that gentle laugh again, just once, but he nods back all the same.

“I can honestly say you’re the first friendly face I’ve seen in a long time.”

In those words was a truth so sad that she aches for him, pangs in her stomach; Daisy’s hand on his shoulder tightens for the briefest of moments, squeezing in compassion. It was the smallest of moments. The simplest of things. But after months of flames and fury, it was all she could offer him.

“You look like hell,” Daisy says instead, smirking at her own joke as she pushes off and jerks her head for him to come with. “Let me get you a coffee.”

Robbie groans, but follows. “Coffee is the last thing I need. Fifteen hours of sleep would be better.”

“We can definitely offer you a bed for the night.” Daisy feels her words leave her lips before she jogs to catch up with them, determinedly ignoring the way her cheeks burned and he snorted at that, rolling her eyes. “I mean SHIELD can. Unless you want to go to see Gabe immediately?”

To her surprise, Robbie shakes his head almost right away. If his jaw was any tighter, she imagined it would pop right off; it jumped at her words, and she read it easily – he wanted to recover first. It would only scare his brother if he saw Robbie so fresh from months wearing flames for skin, and he wanted time to wash the smoke out of his hair before he faced Gabe, because he was the person that mattered to Robbie most in the world and he wasn’t ready to face that yet. She had been in that place not too long ago.

Daisy thought about that as they walked side-by-side through the brick corridor. If she had been stuck in a hell dimension for months, the thing she would miss almost as much as her team would be . . .

“Okay then,” she grins, “how about a big fat cheeseburger.”

Robbie actually moans at that, the sound coming out of him loud enough for her to look both ways and check nobody was around even as she giggles. When she looked back at him, his eyes are shut and his mouth is hanging open, an expression of pure bliss which slipped as he sighs contentedly at the thought. Honest gratitude stood out as he looks over at her again.

“Yes. Yes, please.”

“And fries.”

“Chilli cheese fries,” Robbie adds, perking up. “I swear I’ve been like, dreaming of chilli cheese fries.”

Daisy smiles, playing along with their food pleasure game as she angles them towards the hangar.

“We can swing that. Oh, and you _have_ to try the pie.”

The Charger was in a lock-up facility not far away, safe and sound, but to get to the little diner she had in mind, the one where they had been arrested but did, however, do extraordinary pie, any of the cars or vans from the SHIELD fleet would do. It wasn’t the best use of the vehicles or her time as director, but screw it – she was due a day off, and she was getting Robbie a burger. It was her mission now.

“What kind of pie?” Robbie asks. He was coming back to himself now, the blankness of the Rider fading into the crinkles at the sides of his eyes and the way he drummed his fingers against the pockets of his jeans now he spoke of happier things. It was so nice to see him smiling, even if it was for something as trivial as fries and pie that she keeps going with the increasingly absurd conversation.

Amid the paperwork and just _work_ of being director, the simple things had faded into the rear-view. Now, they were much closer than they appeared. Robbie reminds her that there were still small pleasures, and it was important to enjoy them, because she was free, and not in a hell dimension, so life wasn’t all that bad.

“ _All_ the pies,” Daisy promises seriously; relaxing more and more with each step out of the heart of the base. She squints over at him, considering. “Are you a milkshake kinda guy?”

Robbie answers with another laugh, “Right now, I’m an anything kind of guy.”

As his footsteps follow her down the empty corridors, echoing against the walls as they fall into an easy rhythm, it was hard to keep a smile off her face. The sound of their feet was louder than their laughter, but it was just enough, just enough to keep on walking towards the sun, towards the future. It sounds like the beginning of something.

“Hey,” Daisy says, glancing at him out of the sides of her eyes. She’d rather not look at him for this. “How long can you stay this time?”

Robbie bites his lip; answers, “As long as he’ll let me. This time . . . it feels different than the last. A lot happened while I was gone. He’s just as tired as I am, I think – so I’m hoping,” he broke off to cough, clearing his throat, “I’m hoping I get to stick around a little longer this time. Maybe I’ll even get to stay.”

And she just hums and nods to that, because what is there left to say? His soul is tethered to a spirit that leaves him haunting even as his heart beats, and she had a shield where her own heart should be.

They walk towards the smell of rain, piercing brightness breaking through the hangar doors, and Robbie pauses just as the light hits his face, closing his eyes and lifting his face upwards towards heaven. When it breaks, the smile that grows on his face could bring more life than the rain that hits it. All around them, it strikes the earth, leaving only the distinct smell of rainwater and biting air on their faces: it’s a fresh-smell, a feeling that the world has been cleansed and all that water has sent all the shit down the drains. It’s a blank slate of a world and the keys pressed into her palm and Robbie Reyes’ secret smile. It’s feeling half-full and half-empty and neither feeling being too much.

Daisy watches him, and wonders if the feeling is peace. It could be, she thinks.

It could be.

When he opens his eyes, wiping the water off his face with his palms in a way that just spreads it around, mingling with his freckles and what she suspects are tears at the edges of his eyes, she thinks that it must be. She grins right back.

It’s something.

*

Really, Robbie doesn’t know why he’s there, but his mind had drifted while he was driving, and somehow taken him right to the front doors of SHIELD. There’s been a lot on his mind since he came back a week ago. Stuff he can’t talk to Gabe about, but he needs to talk to someone about before he starts pulling his hair out, so now he’s been sitting in the car for almost an hour, staring at the base and wondering whether or not to go in.

Because on the list of very few people who know about the Rider, he thinks Daisy is the only person who could even begin to understand. The same fire burns in her. All he has to do is go and knock the door. It’s harder than it looks – his stomach twists unhappily, and his hands are frozen on the wheel, not knowing how to even start to talk about this, let alone how to ask her to listen. Just as he decides to leave, thinking that he is being stupid and emotional and she has better things to do, there is a knock on the passenger window.

It’s her.

Of course it’s her, face on the other side of the glass tilting to one side, silently asking him to unlock the door. The goth look he had first met her in is gone, replaced by a suit and a tired expression, which he knows comes with the job of director. Her hair is loose around her face, lightly curled, picking up in the breeze as she leans over to look in the window. He doesn’t know how she got out of the base without him seeing, or why – knowing her, she’d come out the back door just to surprise him and be dramatic, but he sighs and presses the car lock all the same.

The leather seat creaks as she slides into it; Daisy’s eyes settle onto him a moment later.

“You look cheery,” she states. There’s a joke in there, and he almost smiles, but can’t quite bring himself to do it right now. Daisy nods, popping her lips and changing her tone to suit his mood. “Okay then. Start driving, Reyes – the same place we went last week. You never did get to try the pie.”

They had eaten just about everything else in the diner, she fails to add. Robbie had eaten three cheeseburgers before they left, as well as a ridiculous amount of chilli cheese fries, a milkshake, and a hot dog. It had been almost two days before he had to eat again after that. Usually, the grease of fast food made him ill, but after months of nothing it had been heavenly; never pushing, Daisy had told him everything that he had missed in the world, and about SHIELD, and that Gabe had aced his biology tests at the end of the year and received a special award.

The diner was closing by the time they left, stars pricking through the inky blue sky above them, and with each passing hour on earth Robbie had felt both lighter and heavier. Talking lifted a weight from his shoulders, the burden of his memories that he hadn’t felt until then – and he felt more like himself, sinking into his shoes and feeling the world around him, phasing back into focus. It had centered him. Now, he hoped she could again.

“That’s not why I came,” he says quietly, not looking at her, afraid to.

“I know,” she replies, and there’s a hand on his arm a second later. “But it’s easier to talk over coffee and cherry pie, trust me. And – it is really, really good. You’ll thank me after.”

Robbie closes his eyes. He doesn’t deserve this kindness, he tells himself, but he covers her hand with his own for the briefest of seconds anyways, squeezing it before returning to the steering wheel. Nodding to answer her, he pulls them out of SHIELD and onto the open road, towards the little country diner that was more filled with agents than townspeople on any given day. There’s a neon sign hanging overhead announcing that they sell the best pie in the state, and Daisy orders them two slices when they sit at a booth in the corner.

She turns to him with serious eyes afterwards, which is only slightly offset by the loud slurping of milkshake from the straw in her mouth.

“Spill.”

It’s all she says. Daisy has never been an open book, but she’s honest with him at least, and he fidgets slightly under her gaze, eyes dropping down to his hands. His fingers play with the rim of his coffee cup, twisting it from side to side, and now he’s here he doesn’t know what to say.

“I . . .” he starts, stops. Robbie swallows hard. “I don’t even really know why I’m here. Just that I needed to be . . . not there.”

There’s a moment of hesitation before she puts forward. “In L.A or with Gabe?”

“Both,” he answers. “Neither. I – I’m glad to be back, but this world is -” Robbie tries to find the world, the hand on the paper cup shaking now, and it comes to him in noticing how he feels in the empty diner, “loud.”

“Loud?”

“Everything is,” he waves hand around them to indicate the whole damn world, “it’s noisy, after my time in the other places. It’s like – things are too bright, too loud. It’s too much.”

Although he still isn’t looking at her, Robbie can see the sad eyed look Daisy was sending his way, he can feel it penetrating him, right down to his soul. But he has seen hers, too, or at least the Other Guy had, so he thinks it’s okay that she is seeing right through him right now. Robbie’s hand tenses on the cup and he takes a sip. Despite the cream, it burns the roof of his mouth and he winces, just enough to catch a glimpse of her face – and alongside the sadness, there’s something calculating in the look she is giving him now.

He doesn’t expect the next words out of her mouth.

“Come work for SHIELD.”

“I – what?” Robbie freezes, forgetting his tension to watch her fully now, eyes bugging out. The world fades even more around them, isolating just him and her in the booth with his shock, and falls finally, blissfully silent.

“Come and work for me,” she says. “SHIELD might not be what it was, but we’re still doing what we can, and you could help with that. It could be good for you.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not,” Daisy argues, little shake of her head and hint of a smile on her lips confirming her words. She leans forward in her seat, closer to him, and those eyes should come with a warning, he swears. “When I was . . . when I was nothing, SHIELD gave me a purpose. It made me better. Over and over and over, when I thought nothing could get better, it has helped me to find myself again. It could do the same for you.”

“Me?” Robbie grins incredulously, however there is no humour in his words, “Vengeance demon, killer, guy who half your team can’t even look in the eye – work for SHIELD?”

“Yeah! Robbie – I know your situation isn’t ideal, and it will take some adjusting to for some of the team – but they got used to me. They got used to working with Inhumans. They’ll do the same for you.”

“That isn’t the biggest problem here,” he shakes his head, pointing at his face, “fiery vengeance, remember? All the Rider does is destroy.”

“Not true,” she says. There’s no pause, no room for doubt in the way she says that, unwavering in her gaze or words. He wonders what he did to earn Daisy Johnson’s faith. Robbie thinks she’d be better off saving it for someone else, but she’s got a glint of determination in her eye and isn’t done speaking yet, going on, “You saved me. When we told you we needed him, you captured James instead of killing him. You didn’t kill Mace-”

“-Only because of Gabe.”

“No,” Daisy shakes her head. On the table, her fingers twitch and a moment later they join his own, stopping his fidgeting with the cup. “Because of _you_. Robbie, you’re a good person. You love your brother, and you _care_ , and these-” she taps his knuckles, “they’re not just to hurt.”

When the waitress arrives with their pie, causing Daisy to jump a little and pull away her hand, Robbie breathes a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have to reply to that.

Two slices of pie slide into view, topped with enough whipped cream that he laughs out loud at the sight. The part of him that had gone numb with shock is replaced by warmth spreading through his belly as he laughs, especially when he notices that Daisy’s eyes are as big as saucers and she’s looking at the pie like it’s the best thing she’s ever seen. Noticing his smirk, she throws him a challenging look as she shovels a spoonful of pie and cream into her mouth.

“Just wait ‘til you’ve tried it. Then you’ll understand.”

Grabbing a fork, Robbie laughs and does just that. And yeah, okay, she might just have a point. Daisy is watching for his reaction as he slowly chews a more moderate bite that her mouthful, before he tilts his head to one side in acknowledgement of the truth.

“It’s pretty good,” he admits.

Without her mouth to answer, Daisy slams her palms against the metal table twice in reply, an excited sound coming out of her throat. She’s smiling, though, and it’s hard not to follow along with her. As he tucks into the pie, Robbie notices just how quiet the diner is, and how peaceful he feels there. It’s the first time he hasn’t felt overwhelmed in a week. Their talk dies off as they eat, but it’s a good sort of silence, a companionable one, and the desperation he had felt on the drive over fades.

Daisy clatters her cutlery into her dish before Robbie is even halfway through his own slice. She still doesn’t talk, eyes sliding to the window and beyond, not noticing him watching her and appreciating just how nice it was to have a friend. Since the Rider . . . his old friends noticed the distance he put between them, and although Robbie told himself that it was fine; all he needed was his brother, it was unexpectedly nice to have her to talk to.

Robbie slides his bowl to the middle of the table, giving her a nod, and Daisy grabs her spoon again as they share what is left.

It’s quiet again once they’ve finished, much faster with her help, until he breaks it.

“I don’t think I can work for SHIELD,” he says, but goes on as she opens her mouth to argue, “not because of me. Well, yes because of me, but not what you think. You . . . might be right, and this is the first and last time I’ll say that. I might be able to help as the Rider, not just kill, but I’ve already done a lot of damage and I want to make up for that, I think. So I’m gonna stay in L.A and see what happens. I can stay with Gabe that way, too, and try and do some good there.” Robbie shrugs, but when he meets her eyes she doesn’t look disappointed, but proud. “But even if I don’t work for SHIELD: you ever need me, anytime, anywhere – you give me a call.”

“I definitely will,” she smiles. “And if you ever change your mind-”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Okay,” she nods, standing. Daisy pauses at the end of the booth, turning back to him for a second. “See you out there, Robbie.”

“You too, Quake.”

*

Over the weeks, Daisy learns more and more about Robbie through their weekly dinners: firstly, that he is one hell of a picky eater (pun intended). The guy asks if he can have his chicken grilled instead of fried and on the one occasion she lets him pick the venue, takes them to a vegan Mexican place in L.A. Dude even eats burgers with a knife and fork. He gripes about the complete absence of vegetables or ‘anything not deep fried’ on the diner’s menu, and honestly, she’s insulted – the little diner was becoming a backbone for the new SHIELD and she wasn’t going to sit back and hear it slandered like that.

“Snob,” she says, rolling her eyes at him.

“I am _not_ a snob.”

“You’re a food snob,” she tells him frankly, false-superiority plastered on her face to hold back a smile. “That’s like, the third worst type of snob, after rich-snob and intellectual-snob.”

Robbie presses his lips together: whether to hide laughter or because he was irritated, she couldn’t tell. As long as he didn’t burst into flames, she planned to assume the former and keep poking at him. It was fun. These dinners were usually on her nights-off, and she was taking a break from being the serious director for a few hours with a friend, so she was definitely going to keep joking to see what pushed Robbie’s buttons. For Jemma, the line was scientific inaccuracy, whilst Fitz just about dropped down at dirty jokes. She wondered what Robbie’s would be.

For the moment, his mouth had fallen open into a perfect ‘O’ of insulted and petulant.

“Oh,” he scoffs, “So wanting to eat food that isn’t either swimming in grease or a dessert is being a ‘food snob’ now?”

He makes air quotes around her insult, and she has to bite her lip not to laugh. It was so easy, talking with Robbie, play-fighting and for once not being in danger.

“Yep,” she replies, popping the p. Daisy rolls her pizza into a manageable roll and takes a bite from the end, never once breaking eye contact and seeing him make a face at her eating habits, which only makes her laugh with her mouth full. Robbie isn’t impressed.

“Come on, isn’t there some sort of physical requirement for SHIELD agents? Eating all this shit can’t be good for you.”

“I’m in peak physical condition,” she snorts, “do you want me to kick your ass to prove it?”

“No, but some assurance that you do in fact know what a vegetable is would be nice.”

He pouts, and it’s kinda cute, but mostly just funny. Daisy smirks and takes another bite while nodding to drive home her point, as Robbie throws his hands up in the air in defeat, and even though there is amusement in his exasperation, there’s a crease by his eyes as well. It looks like concern, but Daisy can’t be sure if he was being serious or not. Sure, she ate here more often than not, but it was fine. This was only temporary.

“Coulson.” Daisy says, remembering better times. Robbie looks up, curious, making it hard to hold his gaze as she went on, “he uh, he used to be big on the whole ‘team dinners’ thing. He’d go shopping when we stopped someplace and kick everyone out of the kitchen for a couple of hours, and then we – me and May, Jemma, Fitz, Mack too towards the end – we’d all eat dinner together. Since he went missing . . . well, it doesn’t happen anymore. This is just – it’s convenient, and easy, and we’re all so busy that fast food is the best option. Okay?”

The last part is a challenge from her lips.

She lifts her eyes back to him, defiant, but Robbie’s judgement was wiped completely off his face. The light above their usual booth was busted, flickering every few seconds with a buzz; underneath, Robbie’s eyes reflect in the light, pouring out his soul. There’s sympathy in his parted lips and wide eyes. Robbie nods, putting down his cutlery. Apparently sharing earned truth in return, because he began to speak a second later.

“I learned to cook young. After . . . when it was just me and Gabe and Uncle Eli, half the time our uncle would be working late hours, right into the night, so when we got home from school, I used to do dinner for all three of us. It was pretty shitty at first,” he laughed, rubbing a hand through his short hair – upon returning, Robbie had trimmed his moustache and now had a buzzed undercut on the sides of his hair, which he absent-mindedly ran his fingers across as he talked. “I did the same as you for a while – fast food and micro-meals, real TV dinner’s type shit – but I got better. If you wanted, I could teach you.”

It’s a genuine offer, from what Daisy can tell, but it comes as such a surprise that her immediate reaction is to laugh.

Bubbling out of her, she claps a hand over her mouth to stifle it a moment too late, as Robbie shuts down before her eyes. Invisible walls are constructed in seconds; his defences go right back up, she sees the shift behind his eyes, the vulnerability gone in a blink as he leans back in his seat, away from her, obviously feeling mocked. Robbie looks away and she can see the tightness in his jaw.

“Okay, okay, laugh it up,” he gripes instantly, tone suddenly biting. “Keep eating shit for all I care. I was just trying to help. Stay classy, Johnson.”

Standing suddenly, Robbie threw a handful of bills onto their table for his half-eaten food and began to walk away from their table. She could see that she had hurt him. Robbie felt mocked by her laughter, from his reaction, so Daisy reacted quickly, reaching out to grab his arm before he can leave.

“No, no, no, Robbie,” Daisy says in a single breath, trying to stop him. “I wasn’t laughing at _you_ , I promise.”

“Then what’s so funny?”

There’s still hurt in his voice: he stops, but does not turn back towards her. Daisy gestures at his head, “I just have this mental image of Mr. Flames-and-Fury teaching me to cook, that’s what is funny. Rider in the kitchen, just take a moment, imagine that, and then tell me he’s so scary.” A tiny smile appears on his face. “Please tell me you make a damn good barbeque. It’s too golden to miss.”

The smile deepens into a grin. Robbie is used to fighting the world, so Daisy learns to tread carefully in that moment, knowing that seeing his heart as she had was a gift, getting through long-standing walls. But once he realises she means it not to attack, but to include, he smiles and slowly sits back down.

“Domestic Rider,” Daisy teases, prodding him gently in the arm. “Who’d have thought it?”

“I’m sorry for over-reacting,” he says quietly, guilt in his refusal to meet her eyes. “I’m just . . . not used to this. To letting people in.”

“Join the club,” she retorts with an easy smile. Really, there is nothing to forgive. Robbie may be barbed and edged, quick to temper and slow to trust, but so was she, so maybe it is better when they’re together. “In fact, this could be our club. Huh? Dinners and trust issues: the weekly meeting.”

Snickering softly, Robbie finally lifts his head, and she is glad to see the smile back. It suits him down to the ground, like his new look and his old jacket. In fact, an at-ease, laughing Robbie Reyes was a sight for sore eyes, and Daisy notes that when he isn’t on fire or pissed at her, he has a nice smile. She saves that information for another day; determined to see it again.

Just like that, the tense moment passes. They’re okay.

*

Robbie isn’t a member of SHIELD. It’s a point he’s steadfast on in those first few weeks after he comes back, when everything feels new and he’s still too scared to put down roots, living out of a backpack and wandering around his own house trying not to touch anything, not wanting to intrude. He feels half a thief in his own home. But Daisy is right there, elbowing him in the ribs when he tries to sit in the car for too long instead of talking to Gabe and buying enough fast food to fuel a small army, not that he complains.

Whenever she asks, which is often, he feels guilty for a hot second about declining. Days turn to weeks turn to months, and it recedes, as most times she calls him with an emergency, he is usually somehow already halfway there, some sixth sense that she needs him sending him headfirst into the fray. If it’s serious, he shows up – but he’s not an agent and she isn’t his boss: she’s his friend, and that’s better.

They fall into an almost-routine. He does his thing, she does hers, and occasionally they meet in the middle to kick ass – and then there are the dinners. It starts the day he returns, burgers at a diner on the edge of town, but the next week they’re right back there again because Daisy was about to have a stress-breakdown at SHIELD and Robbie could tell, and after that – it becomes a habit. Once every week, they meet up and fill up and rage against the world. It’s nice.

It can’t last. There’s only so much fast food a man can handle.

“Dinner on Saturday,” he tells her, phone cradled under his chin as he wipes black oil from his fingers at the garage. His co-workers still tease him when she shows up, and whenever he answers his phone within three rings, but he finds himself minding less and less. After so long in the darkness, hanging out with Daisy was like seeing the sun for the first time all over again.

“Great, I’ll meet you there-”

“No,” Robbie shakes his head. “Dinner-dinner. Cooked food, not fried. My house.”

“Oh,” she says quietly. There’s a pause, and he hears a door shut and can practically see her rubbing her temples, trying to come up with an excuse. It’s confirmed when she answers, “Uh, are you sure about that? Because that sounds like a family thing-”

“It is,” he tells her, leaving no room for doubt in his tone. Robbie is almost smiling, soft as he leans against the car he’s fixing up, slouching on the bonnet. “Listen, I know you’re worried about Gabe but he doesn’t hate you. He’s just over-protective. And now you’re a superhero-”

“I’m not a superhero.”

“Sure, _Quake_ ,” he rolls his eyes. Only she could miss the light she gave out. “Whatever. But, the point is, he gets it now. And _I_ want you there so he won’t say anything. So just come, okay?”

There’s a beat before she sighs. “Fine. Your cooking better be worth it, Reyes.”

“Yeah, because some of us consider ‘cooking’ to be more than microwaving ramen,” he gripes, and hears her begin to argue back as he ends the call. What Daisy called cooking was an abomination. At the very least, inviting her to dinner would guarantee that she had at least one meal this week that included vegetables. He was beginning to wonder if buying her those vitamin gummies would be a good idea.

Saturday rolls around in the blink of an eye. The main difference from planning to execution is the slow way Robbie prepares the food, clumsily slicing his way through the vegetables lined across the countertop, owing to his bruised and bloody knuckles, painfully working their way through the task. It had been a heavy night. So he was slower than he expected at chopping and dicing, not that he minded, because it was the perfect excuse for an afternoon off, even if his hands were littered with band-aids over scrapes that would be gone by morning.

It also meant that when Daisy arrived, dinner was nowhere near ready. She breezed through his front-door when he answered it, noticing the injuries right away.

“Damn Reyes, you punch a meat-grinder?”

She calls him “Reyes” when she’s teasing and “Robbie” when they’re alone and only ever calls him “Rider” when it’s _Him_ and not him, because she understands that Robbie isn’t always the one driving, and it makes his skin crawl more than he can put into words to hear his own name when his head is engulfed by flames. A lot of the time, he can only keep up with her emotions by what she calls him, so he always pays attention. Right now, she’s looking at the state of his hands with a mixture of sympathy and teasing, and it’s easy, just like all those times in the diner.

Robbie walks back into the kitchen and hears her follow, returning to his dicing with his not so co-operative hands. Stiff fingers fumble the knife. It slips in his thumb and slices a new line of red, which he sucks in between curses as he goes to find his plaster box is almost empty. She pointedly does not comment; he is grateful. Instead, he replies to her entrance.

“You’re one to talk, considering you look beat to hell like, ninety-four percent of the time.”

“Specific, I like it,” she replies, suddenly at his shoulder. Daisy rolls her shoulders, putting on her best casual face as she takes the band-aid from his seizing fingers and wraps it neatly around his thumb. It’s a series of flowing movements in her more steady hands, and he knows she done this before, more than enough times. “Why ninety-four?”

“I figure you must sleep sometime,” he quips back. Robbie watches as she bins the band-aid wrapper, waiting for the comment, but it doesn’t come as she spins on her heels to face him. Her eyes are so like his own.

“What can I do to help?” she asks instead. It catches him slightly-completely off guard.

“I . . .” he blinks, hard. “You want to help?”

“You’re the one always saying how I can’t cook. So are you gonna teach me, or just whine about it?”

“I – I do not _whine_ ,” Robbie pouts, very much aware that he was whining. “I’m just saying that a grown-ass woman should be able to cook more than two meals. And no, ordering pizza to your secret base does not count as cooking.”

“That was _once_!” Daisy cries, scandalised. At his raised eyebrows, she makes a face, crossing her arms with the blade still balanced between her fingers a little too casually – she was dangerous, but the beautiful sort of dangerous that made you want to forget it, just so you could keep looking at her. Even with the knife, her scrunched up nose was cute as she asked. “Wait, how do you know about that? Who snitched?”

“It was on your snapchat story.”

“Oh shit, right,” she nods, looking abashed for an entire three seconds. Then she turns that lazer gaze back on him. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Am I helping or am I just here to look pretty?”

She twirls the knife between her fingers, and Robbie draws blood from biting on the inside of his cheek. It swirled around his mouth, copper on his tongue; he was torn between laughter and disbelief. Daisy Johnson. He’d been to hell and back, several times over, and never had he met another person like her.

Jabbing a finger towards the carrots, he shakes his head, thinking of how grateful he was to have someone who knew about all the shit he stowed, Rider and all, and still was unafraid of him.

“You can help by chopping those.”         

Daisy makes a ‘yeah, yeah’ gesture at him, but is grinning when she grabs the biggest knife in the kitchen and begins haphazardly attacking his carrots. He waits a whole minute before clearing his throat to get her attention. She whizzes around, eyebrows up, knife in her hand glinting dangerously, and looks so pleased with herself that it almost hurts him to correct her.

“You have to peel those first,” he says, trying to keep the smile from working its way onto his lips and failing miserably. She has that effect on him. Ever since he got back the first time, and she greeted him with a joke, exactly what he needed, Daisy had seemed different to him. Maybe it was time, maybe it was relief, but having her around make things seem easier and he wasn’t taking it for granted.

At the comment, she salutes him and grabs a peeler. “Yessir, Chef Reyes.”

He’s biting back laughter and so is she, and yeah, it’s easier to breathe when Daisy is around. The Rider is at the back of his mind, He always is, but – for her, for the part of her that believed he was like her, a hero, someone who could do something other than destroy – Robbie could keep the other guy chained. All he had to do was glance up and see her struggling to peel the carrots, tongue poking out the corner of her mouth, and those shadows were miles and miles away.

By the time dinner is actually done, Gabe is home from school and there are stars visible from the window, peeking out over the L.A haze of a skyline. It’s later than they planned, and there are a few lumpy carrots Daisy claimed as her ugly babies, but it was a home-cooked meal with his almost-family, and Robbie is grinning as he sits down with them both. Even if there is a cloud in the room. Gabe is sneaking glances at Daisy, mistrust in the line of his lips, which she is pointedly ignoring by keeping her head down.

After five minutes of this, Robbie clears his throat loudly.

“Alright, you two. Make nice.”

Daisy blinks faux-innocently, like butter wouldn’t melt, but Gabe sheepishly ducks his head. Blowing air out of his nose noisily, his brother looks over at the girl sitting with them.

“I’m sorry that I said you were trouble, Daisy.”

“I’m sorry that I am,” she replies, but there’s a quirk in the corner of her mouth. “I’m still not entirely convinced that you’re wrong. But since your brother keeps showing up on my cases, I can’t seem to be rid of him. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

Gabe laughs, and she smiles. It’s enough for Robbie to pretend to be offended.

“Please!” he laughs, “You know I’ve saved your life enough times by now that I should practically be on the SHIELD pay-roll.”

“I’ve offered,” she says frankly. “You’re the one who keeps refusing. And I’ve saved your ass too!”

“Language,” Robbie replies, eyes flicking over to his brother, sparking humour. Gabe rolls his eyes at that. Daisy glances between them, waiting for the explosion.

Gabe says, “Sure, I can see your head flame up, but swearing is too much for my innocent little soul to take.”

“Precisely,” Robbie grins. He shovels a forkful of food in his mouth, feeling the sauce drip down his chin but not caring enough to wipe it away, smugly looking between the two of them. Daisy is stifling laughter behind her hand, and Gabe is still busy being a dramatic teen and rolling his eyes. There’s a warmth in his belly that has nothing to do with the amount of spices he’d put on the food.

 _This_ , he thinks, this is what life should be like. _This was worth dying for_.

“So,” Gabe says instead, turning back to Daisy. “You’re not a bankrobber anymore. They’re calling you a superhero now. That true?”

“I wouldn’t . . .” she flushes, looking embarrassed. Robbie knows that she hates being called a hero, which is absurd, because he’s never met anyone more worthy of that title. There’s red in her cheeks and she can’t meet anyone’s eye as she answers honestly, “I wouldn’t call myself that, no. I have powers, sure, but I’d leave the superhero stuff to somebody else.”

“What would you call yourself then?”

Gabe’s not being rude, but curious. It shows in the way his brows draw themselves together, as Robbie knows his own do, and the stillness with which his brother is watching Daisy. Before – Daisy had been on the run, a criminal, and that was all they knew about her. But now there was much more known about the director of SHIELD, the inhuman, the hero who had done so much - and Gabe had read it all. He informed himself, and changed his opinion, much less set in his ways – obviously the stubbornness Robbie was so often accused of having hadn’t run in the family.

She frowns at that. A little wrinkle appears on her forehead, this tiny imperfection, before she smoothes it out with a shrug, turning back to her food.

“I’m working that out.”

Catching his brother’s gaze as Gabe looks over to him, worried he’d overstepped, Robbie gave his brother a comforting shake of his head. It was fine. In all the time he’d known her, which was a short amount of time in days but felt much longer in his mind, Robbie had seen that indecision in Daisy. The sadness which she tried to hide, and the anger boiling underneath, and the way he never could quite understand why she had run from SHIELD when the people there clearly loved her, until he had come back from hell and been terrified to see his brother’s face again.

He thinks that he understands. Trying to show her that, though - that was the harder part.

“So,” he says, to break the silence. “What do you think of real food, Johnson? You might be wondering what the taste is, since it’s not deep fried or pie-based.”

The dark cloud is chased away by his words, and she cracks like lightning. “Shut up, Reyes.”

Robbie laughs back into his food. It’s peaceful as they eat, trading barbs and telling stories about their days, which vary to hilarious effects – “punched four nazi’s in the face today. And a god.” “trigonometry is hard too.” “Well I didn’t flame-out on anyone at work, so I’m taking that as a win” – and by the time it’s over, the smiles Daisy and Gabe send one another aren’t forced, and she offers to get him into the SHIELD academy if he ever decides to go into the “family busniness.”

“Family business?” Robbie scoffs, “What’s that?”

She meets his eye. “Helping people. Getting justice.”

That shuts him up. Robbie feels himself go silent, numb, staring at the space where her eyes had been.

Vaguely, still half in shock, he hears Gabe laugh and claim that if he ever wants to take her up on that offer, he’ll let her know, but for now he’d be happy just passing chemistry and trig. In order to do just that, he leaves to do his homework not long after; Daisy calls goodnight, and somehow Robbie blinks and finds himself standing on the porch with her. The yellow porch light hanging over them floods a little out into the street, which is quiet, the atmosphere only broken by the distant sounds from the city – she’s pausing, crossing her arms and standing on the step below him, and it’s only when she speaks that Robbie is pulled from his haze.

“That was nice. Better than I thought it would be – I was nervous, if I’m honest. But that felt – it almost felt _normal_. Like we were ordinary people, having an ordinary dinner, on an ordinary night.” Daisy bites her lip at first, but turns that smile on him before she says the last part, and what’s even more shocking is that it reaches her eyes. “Thank you. For doing that. I haven’t felt normal in a long, long time.”

“It’s over-rated,” he jokes back weakly, “us freaks have much more fun, don’t you know.”

The breeze catches her laugh and carries it away. It’s quieter than usual, he notices. When he had first met her and they were barely allies, her laugh had grated against him like sandpaper. Now, it was one of the rare pleasures in life. Daisy was unashamedly herself, and her laugh was a part of that package – loud, long, hopeful. Tonight, it was a dulled knife’s blade, and it hurt him to notice its absence.

“I think I worked it out,” he says, looking down on her.

“What?”

“What you are.”

She blinks, that wrinkle between her eyebrows appearing again. There’s confusion where the light catches her eyes, setting them alight, and he steps down to stand level with her. Feeling the edges of his lips threatening to ruin his plan by being sentimental and smiling, Robbie forces his gaze away from her, out towards the city beyond, pulling something out of his pocket as he does. Without looking at her, he hands it over.

It’s Daisy’s SHIELD badge.

He hears her sharp intake of breath as she takes the badge, their fingers brushing as she does, and he can feel hers shaking. Words would only ruin this. She had to know what it meant – he’d call her a hero but she’d argue; she’d call herself a failure but he wouldn’t hear a word of it; so this was what she was – a SHIELD agent. A barrier between the world and what would harm it. It wasn’t a bad thing: it was a badge of honour, and he could see how easily she fit back into SHIELD, and how it welcomed her; in those days, in those hours, he could tell how much it meant to her.

It was who she was, through and through.

“Thief,” Daisy manages to choke out beside him, although her voice is cracked. An elbow in his ribs catches Robbie’s attention, pulling his eyes away from the city and towards a brighter light, and her face is soft as she looks back at him. “When did you take this?”

“During dinner, after Gabe asked. I saw your face,” he replies, tilting his head to one side. If he could get past miss-director-of-a-spy-agency to pickpocket her, he was slightly proud of it. The look on her face had nothing to do with the warmth spreading through him, not at all. “That,” he taps the metal of the badge, “that is who you are.”

Daisy doesn’t say anything, she can’t, from the look on her face, but she pockets the badge and squeezes his hand before walking down the rest of the steps. He squeezes back, just briefly, just enough to let her know he understands. The darkness swallows her up, back off to her base and her people, and Robbie knows she’ll be okay: she belongs there.

He doesn’t really know what Daisy is to him. She’s his friend, without a doubt, but he understands her down to her soul, and her down to his, so he thinks that ‘friend’ is too small a word for what they were. She was the first person to see the Rider as something more than an out-of-control fire, the first person to see _him_ in the flames, Robbie Reyes, and he’s starting to believe her that he can be more. She’s not just his friend, that’s not even close to encompassing what she was, but what exactly she was, he didn’t know.

Because there had been too many disappointments in his life. Too many times he’d hoped for something only to find himself flying from a car and minus his soul. And hoping for anything at this point, corrupted as he was, felt like a waste of time – or time wasn’t right, because he didn’t know if his deal meant he’d ever die, or if he’d be stuck behind that damn wheel forever, seeing flames. Seeing her smile might have made him weak, but it ached, too, _desperately_. No matter what she was – she could never be that, never be his future, because he was hoping for nothing, and she deserved somebody whole.

All he knows is that she’s something.

*

Daisy was in the SHIELD break room, blissfully empty for once, with a stale bag of Doritos and a documentary about space on the TV. Jemma had been with her at first, only to be called away five minutes after they sat down for an urgent mission. It seemed that there was a disaster somewhere every five minutes these days. Daisy had made a sympathetic face; part of the new SHIELD order was that its agents being contractually obliged to work for the government when requested in various different departments, so even as the director, she could do nothing for her friend. It left her alone and considering just going to bed, calling it a day at 5pm, which wasn’t an entirely bad idea, considering the week she had been having.

There had been the cyber attack on Monday, the lawsuit on Tuesday, a double bill of Watchdogs and an enhanced natural disaster on Wednesday, and that day she had been investigating an 0-8-4 in Java. Because of the laws of the universe and the monopoly of shitty karma on her life at the moment, the unknown object had turned out to be a landmine, which she accidentally stood on, and then had to stand for four hours while waiting for the bomb disposal unit. Daisy was bone-tired and had been looking forward to an evening off, watching crappy reality television with her best friend, but now Jemma was gone . . . well, at least nothing bad could happen while she was asleep. She hoped.

Daisy was contemplating what she had done to deserve this luck when Robbie appeared in the doorway, flushed with relief at finding her, before walking into the room. Eventually he came to a stop, standing in front of her, unsure whether to sit or stand, from the way he is looking at the empty seat beside her.

“Hey,” she says, glad of the distraction. In invitation, she pats the two-man couch next to her. Robbie sits with a grateful nod: however he doesn’t seem to relax, sitting tensely, with his hands against his knees and back straight, miles away from the cushions.

“Hey,” he echoes back, distracted. Robbie’s eyes drift to the TV. Currently, there was an animation of an exploding nebula on screen. “What’s this? I’m hoping it’s not real and the end of the world, although I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Just a space documentary. Gotta keep up with the family, you know.”

Daisy sends him a wink and a grin, pleased with her joke, but her companion barely seems to notice. Instead of laughing at her relatable alien humour, he just hums slightly, nodding as if nothing odd had been said at all. Sitting up straighter, Daisy raises her voice to ask.

“What’s shaking, Reyes?”

There’s a snort at that, Robbie rocking on his heels, hands wound together tightly. The chain is absent from around his neck, though, so she assumes that he isn’t there on Rider business, but as he shifts from foot-to-foot in front of her, it is clear that he is nervous about something. Her eyes squint, trying to work him out. Unfortunately, he has always been a hard read.

“Nothing dangerous,” he confirms quickly. Robbie gives a small shake of his head, eyes darting about all over the place, taking in the base with a distracted sort of curiosity, looking everywhere but at her. “You wanna get out of here?”

Daisy agrees, because whatever this is, it isn’t nothing. “Sure.”

Pushing herself to her feet, she wipes the chip dust off her leggings, cursing under her breath. Yellow flecks stubbornly refuse to move. The price of snacking was ruined clothes. Just as she is about to announce that she is changing before they go anywhere, he speaks up.

“What is that?”

“Dinner,” she replies, shaking the bag in his direction. “Shit, I’m gonna have to change. Want one?”

After the silence stretches too long, Daisy pulls her eyes away from rubbing at her clothing to him; brows drawn together, Robbie is looking at the bag in confusion. “That’s your dinner?”

“It’s all we had in the cupboard,” she shrugs in turn, remembering his weird food thing too late. It has been a week of overtime and stress, leaving Daisy in no mood to have her junk food habits judged, so she makes a face. “Don’t start, Rob. I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not starting anything,” he argues. “But I _am_ gonna take you to the store, get you some more stuff. We can restock the base. You’ll feel better if you eat something other than stale chips, grumpy.”

Robbie is walking away before she can get a word in, however he might just have a point, as Daisy’s stomach grumbles loudly. The last few days, she had been surviving almost entirely on the tasteless nutrition bars that Mack and May ate. It wasn’t tasty or particularly filling. At least this way she could buy fresh snacks, so begrudgingly, she followed him outside to the Charger.

As they tear down country roads, grass taller than them either side, Robbie is pensive and quiet, knuckles white and – Daisy glances at the speedometer to check – yeah, they’re going insanely fast. But, she reckons that being the director of SHIELD would get them out of a parking ticket if they’re stopped. Worry sparks in her gut, although strangely it has nothing to do with the speed: something is wrong with Robbie, and she doesn’t know what, and it’s unsettling. She doesn’t know what to do.

The store they find is like a nuclear bunker.

It’s stocked with everything from shower curtains to cereal to literal guns, and Daisy tries not to let it show how much it bothers her as they walk in. A blast of air conditioning hits her in the face as they pass through the door, flicking her hair off her shoulders lightly; she notices a camera above them, quickly scanning the room to find half a dozen more. She bites her lip. If they don’t get into any trouble, it would be fine. But. Well, it’s really not her week, and with her recent luck, they would end up being attacked by Watchdogs or the weird bunker-in-my-garden type nuts who probably shopped here.

“You sure about this place?” she murmurs to Robbie. Although she is sure no one else was in ear-shot, she looks around them quickly anyways.

“It’s the first place we’ve seen in almost thirty miles. Your base is disconnected, Miss Director. It could be miles before we find anywhere else.”

She knows that _he_ knows that she hates it when he calls her _director_ , so huffs and trudges further into the bizarro version of wamart, and _fine, they’ll just get murdered here and probably never be seen again_. Daisy hopes their memorial is nice. At the very least, she expects Fitz to find a way to launch a dedication to her awesomeness and bravery into space. Arms crossed, scowling every time he looks over, she wanders beside Robbie through the aisles, hoping that they don’t have the misfortune to run into anyone else.

Robbie pushes a cart with a bum wheel, so every few seconds it bumps into her hip so she pushes it back towards him, giving an almighty screech as it goes. Yeah, she definitely hates this place. And no, it has nothing to do with her shitty week and empty stomach and the fact that Robbie is too wrapped up in his thoughts to notice her annoyance.

“Robbie,” she moans, throwing three boxes of pop tarts into the cart. “Pay attention to me.”

“I am.”

He shoots her a sweet smile as he takes the sugary food out of the cart.

“Asshole.”

“Mnn-hmmmn,” Robbie hums, agreeing with her. The smile never falters. Despite it all, that look draws one out of her, too. Daisy feels the edges of her lips flick up, subtly throwing a bag of marshmallows into the bottom of the cart, where he was less likely to notice.

He does.

It becomes a game after that: Daisy tries to smuggle junk food into their load amid Robbie’s healthy cereals and vegetables and meat that _isn’t in burger form, Johnson_ ; and he promptly throws it out. If he catches her. Which, admittedly, he does eight times out of ten, but Daisy still ends up with some pot stickers and cookies by the time they get to the counter. She pulls out her SHIELD bank card to pay, waving Robbie off when he reached to grab his wallet.

“The US government has got this.”

Robbie chuckles at that, helping her to bag their items so they both have an armful of brown paper bags by the time they step back into the chilly air of the waning afternoon. November was well upon them now. Putting all their shopping in the back of the Charger just feels _wrong_ , somehow, but that doesn’t stop Daisy from sneaking a packet from one of the bags as Robbie shuts the trunk.

“Hey,” she says, brandishing the pack of microwave popcorn. “What do you think would happen if we tried to cook this on your flaming car?”

“No-” Robbie replies, almost before the question is done. “Not a chance.”

“But-”

“Snowball in hell, Johnson.”

“You’d know,” Daisy snorts, and sees his unexpected smile. Most people would skirt around jokes about his devil side – but Robbie wasn’t scary anymore. Maybe he had been at first, because it wasn’t every day that you saw a man with his head on fire, but as soon as she saw past the Rider and to _Robbie_ , all fear was permanently erased. Now, making jokes about the Rider as she nudged him in the side was as natural as breathing.

“Let’s get you home before you have any more bad ideas,” Robbie says, hiding his laughter ineffectively as he walked over to jump into the driver’s seat. Daisy laughs and follows him, jumping into through the window and hearing him shout, kicking her feet up onto the dash over to have them shoved off, as she laughs and Robbie gripes and things are a little better than they were before he showed up and turned her night around.

Daisy looks sideways at him. “So.”

“What?”

“The thing that was bothering you. Wanna talk about it?”

Robbie deflates in his seat a little, shoulders slumping down as he shook his head. It’s a quick movement, short but sure, saying _no, not right now_. Tightness pinches around his eyes, and something is wrong, but for now, Daisy lets it go. Whatever it is – he’d tell her when he was ready.

“Okay,” she nods, turning her eyes back to the road. “My door is always open, though. Come and find me if you need to.”

For a moment, she doesn’t think he is going to reply. When Robbie speaks, it’s barely a whisper, a little hoarse but real.

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Human Torch.”

“I-” Robbie is laughing again, and its better, “am _not_ the human torch!”

“Sure thing, Flame Boy.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” Daisy laughs. “You love me.”

He doesn’t deny it.

She’s getting used to riding shotgun is his car as they race towards the moon hanging above. It’s a good feeling.

*

“When did this become my life?”

Robbie asks himself that quietly, not quite believing his own eyes – which for someone who has seen some really weird shit; it is a feat in itself to shock him. And he’s just about floored.

When Daisy had called him with an SOS for help, he had been in the Charger before the call had even ended, roaring in flames towards Vegas a second later. On the phone, she had been vague about the details, claiming they needed another big hitter and from the sounds on the back of the call, distant explosions and Mack swearing, Robbie guessed it was serious.

He made it there in just over an hour. On the drive, Robbie had time to reflect on what the danger might be and what damage might have been caused. For her to call him in, voice breathless, he was imaging natural disasters or an all-out warzone or the sky about to fall. It was wasted energy trying to predict the future - mostly, he worried that he would be too late. If something happened to Daisy . . . well, a world without her wasn’t worth even thinking about.

Out of everything his worried mind created, Robbie did not expect this: a fifty foot monster like something out of _scooby doo_ , scaling the side of a casino and leaving destruction in its wake.

“When you sold your soul to the man in red, probably.”

Robbie feels a grin crack his face. Slowly, he turned on his heels to face her. “Actually, I’m pretty sure it was when I met you.”

Daisy is standing in the street behind him, arms crossed, one leg popped and a challenging grin on her face, broken open as she laughed at his words. Aside from a cut underneath her eye, the red catching his attention as the relief at hearing her voice slid off his face, she looks alright, despite the thin layer of dust from the rubble marking her leather jacket. Robbie feels relief flood through him. Standing there, shining out of the destruction like a beacon, Daisy is in her element.

Robbie jerks a thumb over his shoulder, “How’d you piss of _King Kong_?”

“We we think it’s an Inhuman,” she replies, walking forwards. They turn to face the monster. It’s raging, buildings crashing all around them with a cacophony of noise and chaos, so they stand near a wall for shelter to observe its rampage. Daisy falls into place beside him, her head reaching to just under his eyeline, but she is in director-superhero mode, voice more serious than usual. “The transformation is sometimes physical like this. There was another one I knew . . . Lash, he – he turned into a beast.”

“What happened to him?”

Robbie can feel that he is walking on hallowed ground, treading carefully as he asks, eyes only on her.

“I couldn’t save him,” she replies. Robbie notices her throat rise and fall as she swallows hard, the emotion rippling across her focus like a pebble across a still pond, before she looks back up at him sharply, determination in her gaze. “We have to help this one. Whoever it is, that’s a person in there. We have to help them, not stop them.”

“Then why did you call me?” he asks, blinking. “Did you forget what it is I do?”

“I know what you are. And I’ve told you before: you’re not just a weapon, Robbie. I need your help here – are you with me?”

“You know I am.”

Robbie replies in a heartbeat, the words falling out of his mouth easily. That, there was never any doubt of. Having Daisy’s back is the easy part. The harder part is trying to think of another purpose for his bruised and bleeding hands aside from killing.

But then she’s grinning at his words, and it’s so bright that he thinks he can try.

“Go team,” Daisy says, turning towards the fray. “Let’s go.”

Predictably, he follows her.

Even more predictably, the fight gets worse before it gets better, and by time the Inhuman monster form is napping in a containment module on the way up to the jet in the skies above, Robbie is nursing several broken ribs and a mountain sized lump on the head. But – the Inhuman is alive. His hands are hurt but not bloody and the Rider is subsiding as the flames around his head are quenched, and Robbie looks with his own eyes at the carnage. It’s not the worst he’s ever been, but it’s not the best either, but he’s still on his feet as he staggers over to Daisy, grasping her hands and helping her to her feet. She grimaces in pain but is steady once she’s up.

“Thanks,” she murmurs.

“Don’t mention it.”

“Still gonna come when I call?”

She says it lightly, like it’s a joke, but there’s something hesitant in her tone that makes him look over. Daisy is clutching at her side, breath ragged, jacket still smoking slightly from all the fire and explosions. Robbie vaguely wonders if this is a typical day at SHIELD. But she isn’t meeting his eyes: she’s looking at the destruction like it’s their fault, like she feels the weight of every fallen brick, so he reaches over and puts a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m always gonna come when you call,” Robbie tells her, giving an assured nod to tie it off. Slinging her arm around his shoulder, he supports half of her weight as they take a few haphazard steps down the street. “Come on, let’s get you home. Or to a hospital. Dealer’s choice.”

Daisy groans emphatically in response. At this point, he’s not really sure if he’s holding her up, or whether it’s the other way around. He certainly feels ready to drop.

After a dozen steps, Daisy stops in her tracks. “There.”

Robbie’s spine straightens like a rod has been shoved down it. Instantly alert, pain subsiding to action, he takes half a step forwards and looks around for the danger she had spotted. Looking both ways down the street, all he can see are empty buildings, evacuated long ago and in a hurry by the look of the upturned trashcan and broken windows. What is noticeably missing – a threat.

He turns back to her, “What?”

“There,” she points, “you said Dealer’s Choice. I wanna go there.”

Following her finger, Robbie turns his head to see an empty Waffle Hut, lights somehow still on and door swinging on his hinges. Eyebrows drawing together, he turned back to her.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nu-uh,” Daisy shakes her head, taking a few steps towards the restaurant. “It’s been a shitty day and I am tired and pretty much entirely bruised and I want a waffle. Keep up, hot wheels.”

She plunders towards the faint smell of food, limping on every right step. The city is in ruins around them, and the sky rumbles with the sound of jet engines above, but she isn’t stopping, charging down the building like it’s the only mission that matters. Robbie just watches her go for a moment. Then, his head tilts to the side as he laughs, hard, jaw locking as he follows her anyways, to the gates of hell itself – or even just to a food joint.

By the time he catches up, she’s grabbed a soda from the fridge behind the counter and swiped a waffle from the counter, collapsing with a grunt into a booth in the corner. He takes a soda and joins her, sliding into the bench opposite her with a sigh as he took the weight off his aching limbs, closing his eyes in relief. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. A soda can opens with a crack and a hiss, as Robbie peels his eyes open in time to see Daisy take a sip from the cold can, droplets of condensation rolling down the sides and over her chipped back nail polish.

She makes a face of pure bliss, “Damn, that’s good.”

Cracking open his can, Robbie joins her. “Isn’t this stealing?”

“We saved the town,” she replies with a shrug, “and I’ll get SHIELD to reimburse them later. That’s the problem with not having pockets in my uniform.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Robbie shakes his head. Fortunately, he is wearing jeans, and jams his hand into them before pulling out a few dollar bills, a couple of coins, a piece of red string and some lint. It just about covers them. “This one’s on me.”

“Then I owe you double. You did good out there today, Robbie.”

She’s sincere.

“Thanks,” he replies, because he gives out what he gets. “And you owe me nothing, Daisy. Without you? I definitely wouldn’t be standing here now, and the past few months wouldn’t have been as easy as they were. You helped me. A lot.”

He rarely uses her name. It feels like something that has to be earned, and he calls her _Johnson_ or _Quake_ to retaliate to the endless supply of nicknames and fire jokes she sends in his direction. But now, he uses _Daisy_ because they’re being earnest, and because he is telling the truth. She smiles because she notices the change, he hopes.

Daisy takes a bite out of her swiped waffle and takes a drink so long from her soda can that he wonders how she’s breathing. He is half-glad that she makes no reply to what he said, instead settling to watch her with a mixture of revulsion and admiration. It takes about thirty seconds. Victoriously, she slams it down on the counter when she is done. The sound tells him that it’s now empty, and Robbie nods, impressed.

“Your turn.”

Robbie laughs, shaking his head. “Nope.”

“Killjoy,” she gripes, leaning back into the cushioned booth bench. Daisy’s head reaches the back of the seat and she lifts her waffle to her lips, sinking further and further into the seat. If they don’t move soon, he doubts they’ll be able to.

Robbie laughs instead, standing. “We should get going.”

“No. I live here now.”

“Okay,” he shrugs, taking a sip from his can and turning to leave; throwing pleasantly over his shoulder, “I’ll leave you to speak to the reporters, then. The news will be swarming around here like vultures within the hour.”

Daisy groans, loudly and miserably. “Dick.”

“Devil, actually,” he grins back smugly. She opens her eyes a fraction for long enough to send him a dirty look. Robbie wanders back over to her, offering a hand. “Up you get, Quake. If you’re not out there saving the world, who will?”

As they walk out of the diner, the support walk becomes more of arms-around-each-other’s shoulders, and Daisy’s cheeks are slightly red with the compliment. Today was a win, Robbie thinks. As long as that smile stays on her face . . . every day is a win.

*

At one of their dinners at the diner, Robbie brings her a lasagne in a plastic lunch box, a sticky note on top telling her how long to put it in the oven for and everything. She’s touched, when she’s done being patronised. After a long phone call in which she told him that she’s fine eating whatever nuked crap is in the SHIELD fridge, thank you very much, and that she lived in a van before she was in SHIELD and there wasn’t exactly a kitchen to learn to cook in so he can stop judging, Daisy actually relents and eats the damn thing.

And it’s something _holy_ , but she doesn’t tell him that afterwards.

Robbie, of course, shows up next time with four containers instead of one and gives her one of those secret smiles, the one that makes her feel transparent. When he speaks, she can hear the honesty in his words.

“I know what it’s like to not know when your next meal is comin’. I’m not doing this because you can’t cook; I’m doing it because I can,” he says, shrugging modesty, “and if I can add a few marks to your warm cooked meals tally, then I’ve done something worthwhile.”

She kind of wants to cry at that, biting her lip to stop just that from happening. People – people care about her now, she knows that, her team loves her even, but it is still a shock to her system whenever somebody actively cares about her wellbeing. Robbie was cooking for her so that she was eating well, no other reason, and she was kind of mad at the same time that she couldn’t be angry at him anymore, settling for sliding the containers closer and muttering “thank you” with as much strength as she could muster.

“You don’t have to thank me. I’m not good for much but cars and killing these days, but I can still make some damn good enchiladas.”

There’s a smile that doesn’t make it all the way to his eyes, and she knows he is doing this for himself as much as for her. They’re quite the pair of messes. She laughs in turn, because she knew there was something she had liked about Robbie Reyes from the start. She was glad she had followed through on her hunch that he was a good guy.

After that, Robbie hands her over food whenever they meet, and she gives him back clean lunch boxes.

When he starts adding ‘Quake n Bake’ in bold black letters to the post-it notes telling her how long to reheat the food for, she just about cracks a rib laughing. The first note ends up stuck on the edge of the computer on her desk, next to a few small photo-booth strips of her and Fitz and Jemma, and a couple of ticket stubs. It fits right in with her life, messy and disorganised as it is, and she thinks that Robbie would appreciate the irony in that. He had fallen into her life completely by accident but now if a week went by without seeing him she started getting bored she had been known to ‘borrow’ the quinjet for a quick trip to L.A.

“It’s nice,” Jemma says, grabbing a fork to steal some of the food. How word had gotten around the base that Robbie was an amazing cook, she didn’t know, but Daisy had been forced to put a lock on her mini-fridge after several attempts of thievery. Jemma, she let share, as they crashed in the common room after a long day and about twenty hours after they needed to be sleeping. “That he does this, I mean. He must care about you a lot.”

Jemma’s eyebrow is entirely too high and crooked for it to be an innocent comment.

“It’s not like that,” Daisy says, although she doesn’t have an answer for what it _is_ like. “We’re just . . .”

“Yes, Director?”

And Jemma’s got that knowing smile on her face, like she can see something they can’t, like she knows exactly what will happen; so Daisy throws a cushion at her head. God, she loves her friends. Laughing, Daisy scoops more linguini into her mouth to give herself a moment to think of an answer that sounded believable.

“We’re _friends_ ,” she replies emphatically. “I – it’s complicated, okay?”

Jemma hums, sipping her margarita through a straw. It’s almost as knowing at the eyebrow, and Daisy almost screams, knowing that ‘complicated’ would never satisfy her friend’s curiosity – and half-grateful to talk about this with somebody. She and Jemma had spoken about relationships before, but not much since she had returned to SHIELD, and just talking it through with her best friend like the old days was a relief. It would be a miracle if she managed to work out what she and Robbie were, though.

So Daisy goes on, thinking out loud. “When I met Robbie I was . . . dark. I wasn’t in a good place. But he wasn’t either, and –I think, and nobody in the world understands that like he does. I look at him, and watching him try, with his brother and his life despite this – this _thing_ – hanging over his head . . . it makes me believe that I can try, too.”

Of course, by this time Jemma is smiling, watching Daisy closely with that sappy look. She still believed in romance, even now, when she and Fitz were still shaky, after all they had been through. There’s something romantic in Jemma’s eyes as she simply shrugs and smiles.

“If you say it’s nothing more, I believe you.”

Very obviously, she doesn’t. Daisy pouts in response, “I’m _so_ not sharing my food with you next time.”

Jemma’s eyes bug out. “No! You wouldn’t.”

“I would.”

Daisy is smirking, and she bursts out into giggles at the look on her best friend’s face, as Jemma composes herself enough to challenge back. “Fine. I won’t say anything else – but I do think you should tell him what you just told me. And I know for damn sure that if anyone made me food this good, I would have married them on the spot.”

They both laugh at the joke, as the moment passes them by, forgotten almost entirely by the next morning. After, they speak of a lot of other things, bad and good, fighting with their forks and cleaning three of the containers in a single night by themselves – which Daisy sheepishly has to explain to Robbie the next day.

“We were hungry,” she says meekly over her coffee, not looking him in the eye.

“Damn, girl,” he laughs, and she looks up just in time to see how pleased he looks with himself. “Next time, just ask for extras and I’ll throw something in for your friends, too.”

That was how the SHIELD team got sent seven home-made pizza’s from the Reyes household, and Daisy never heard the end of her team begging her to invite Robbie over for dinner.

To his credit, Robbie can _cook_. And Daisy might not have much to compare it to, but the warmed-up food he makes her, she saves for the days she feels drained and like nothing in the world is on her side, and it never fails to make her feel better again. It’s a taste of home, although SHIELD is the closest she’s ever had to one and the metaphor is faulty: but biting down on the food Robbie cooks feels like just that – warmth and spices after a long day, the sort of thing she’d imagined family dinners would taste like when she was a kid at the orphanage. It tasted like knowing someone cared. If she was to imagine what home would taste like, it was Robbie Reyes cooking, and she doesn’t really know what to do with that.

So, she completely ignores it and tries to block out the team’s comments whenever he shows up on his bike for no other reason than to drop her off food, with Jemma mouthing ‘marry him’ over Robbie’s shoulder as he drops something off on her desk. It’s miles out of his way and she knows it’s his only day off this week, but she tells herself it doesn’t mean anything. Especially when she offers for him to stay and they eat it together, sitting on opposite ends of her desk and using the monitor to watch horror movies.

“Unrealistic,” Robbie says, shaking his head in disgust as some kids accidentally summon a demon and sell their souls. “It doesn’t happen like that. And I should know.”

Daisy just about chokes on her mouthful at that. He grins, like the smug bastard he is, and she tries to tell herself that its shock at him joking about his own situation that makes her stomach flip and not the smile. Definitely not the smile.

She sips her beer to avoid showing it, almost spilling it down her jumper in the process. _Smooth moves, Johnson_.

“Kids these days and their inaccurate summoning of the devil,” she agrees after managing to gulp down her swallow, and hears him chuckle. “They wouldn’t know a real spirit of vengeance if you punched them in the face.”

The glowing screen is the only light on in her office – Coulson’s office, but she’s finally starting to think of it as hers, with the pictures from her and Jemma’s trip last month to visit Bobbi and Hunter in Peru, and of the team, and the hidden bag of gummy bears in the bottom drawer that nobody knows about – but it’s enough to catch his face in profile opposite her as he laughs out loud at that. It’s the unexpected sort of laughter, the kind that takes over before the body can catch up and lights it with pure unadulterated, shocked joy. Robbie has never looked as young as he does in that moment.

When he stops laughing, the noise loud in a way that he usually holds back, eyes squeezed shut and and leaning his head back against his chair, Robbie turns to look at her, eyes shining. She knows she is smiling back, can feel the challenging turn of her own lips, but at his honest laughter her one-upmanship changes to a grin more genuine, just pleased to have made him laugh so much. There’s a moment when they look at one another too long. It passes, and Daisy clears her throat and Robbie sips his beer, and they watch the rest of the movie, each trying to make the most inappropriate joke about the Rider. Laughing in the face of the things weighing them down was the best resistance.

All through the night, their faces and their sides ache from laughing, as anyone passing in the corridor stop, trying to remember the last time they heard the sound coming from Director Johnson’s office. It’s not much, but laughter has its power, and so apparently does Robbie Reyes’ magical cooking, so it’s enough for tonight. Daisy is happy, more so than she thinks she has the right to be, sitting there with him. She tries not to think about what that means.

They’re something. But neither of them are ready for it yet. So when the movie ends, Daisy nods and Robbie doesn’t kiss her goodnight, and both of them pretend later that it’s for the best, really trying to believe it.

*

It’s Christmas, and Robbie is making a family recipe for spicy eggs and toast for breakfast, like he has done every Christmas since he and Gabe were on their own. His brother has a bird’s nest for hair and sleepy eyes, but Robbie feels more alive than he has in years of Christmases, awake at 6am and cooking in the early hours, smoke and spices filling his lungs and fogging up his brain pleasantly. At the very least, despite the past year and his separation, he is home for Christmas. It means a lot to be there with his brother.

The Rider is . . . far away, that morning. He feels free: no chains, no flames, just a warm L.A Christmas with his brother and nothing to do all day but eat and hang out.

“Something came for you,” Gabe says, wheeling himself back into the kitchen. He’d gone to get the mail while Robbie was busy, and tossed a slim package more or less at his brother’s head, idly flipping through the rest of their mail in his distraction. Robbie grins and catches the package with one hand all the same, turning it over in his hands a second later.

“Huh.”

“What?” Gabe asks, glancing up. He waves the stack in his hands, “the rest of this is just cards from people we haven’t seen in years and a leaflet from the pizza place on the corner – which apparently doesn’t even shut on Christmas, go figure – so what did you get? It’s gotta be more interesting than this.”

“Don’t know yet. But from the weird stamp, it’s gotta be from SHIELD,” Robbie replies, but his eyes are on the handwriting spelling out his name and address, far away. It has to be from Daisy - nobody else would do those ridiculous circles above her i’s like they were still in grade school. God, he was _smiling_ at it, having to mentally shake to remind himself that Gabe was still in the room, and he was not allowed to fall in love with Daisy Johnson.

“Go on, then. Open it,” Gabe says. There’s a teasing note to his tone that Robbie pretends that he doesn’t hear. “I want to see what the Director of SHIELD gives my dumb brother for a gift.”

Robbie smirks, “Wiseass.”

“Language!”

And yeah, he earned that one. Robbie is laughing to himself as his fingers slip beneath the folds of the brown paper packaging, tearing open the side and sliding out first a card in a red envelope, and then a piece of black fabric, folded carefully inside the paper. First, he’s disappointed. It looks like a uniform, and that she’s trying to recruit him again, so he sighs and puts the black clothing down and tears at the card instead. The same loopy writing and circled i’s mark out his name on the front, with an added ‘& Gabe!’ underneath.

Opening the card, on the front of which is a cartoon of the Hulk wearing a Santa hat and trying to find the chimney at Stark tower, one of the avengers joke cards that were produced in their dozens since the incident, he read:

_Robbie,_

_Merry Christmas!_

_(If you celebrate it. If not, happy holidays!)_

_Hope my gift isn’t too-on-the-nose and I’ll see you next Wednesday._

_Love your favourite partner,_

_Daisy xxx_

_P.S – tell Gabe I say happy holidays too. There’s a gift for him with yours._

Despite his brief annoyance at the SHIELD uniform, Robbie huffs out a laugh at the card, rolling his eyes before handing it over to his brother to read. He tries not to think too much on ‘love’ Daisy and fails. It was just a word, just a thing people put on cards, but – his heart tugged reading it, and does again thinking about it. Pushing it aside, he turns back to the black uniform with a frown.

Picking it up, he unrolls the uniform . . . to find that it is _not_ a uniform. For one, it was too long and only a single item of clothing – it takes a full unroll to reveal the shape of an apron; something metal falls out of the folds, which he barely catches. It was some kind of calculator, but with way too many buttons with symbols he didn’t even think were real on it. Assuming it was some science-shit for Gabe, he tosses it over, hearing an excited whoop a moment later, as Robbie returns his gaze to the apron.

Realizing he is holding it the wrong way around, he turns it over before bursting out laughing.

On the front of the black apron was a little red demon, and the words ‘Devil in the Kitchen’ surrounded by flames.

Robbie laughs for about five minutes at that. It’s – it’s so dumb, and cheesy, and he cannot believe he’s laughing about the fact that he sold his soul to the devil but he is, and she’s the cause. It’s the best gift he could have asked for, to be able to laugh about it. He laughs, red in the face, until Gabe demands to see what’s so funny.

Putting on his apron proudly, Robbie turns, hands on hips to pose for his brother, and the two of them break into laughter anew. Gabe’s is slightly worried, still not really talking much about the Rider, but it’s not forced, and that’s a start. It feels so good that they can share this. To laugh in the light instead of hiding who he is in the dark.

Robbie plans on wearing it all day, and does just that.

While they open presents, the apron remains attached to him, and it even comes in useful when he turns his attention to cooking dinner midway through the day. He sings bad carols and half-watches _it’s a wonderful life_ from the kitchen, dancing around in his socks and feeling alive, and grinning, so much he starts to wonder if there’s something in the water, but it doesn’t really matter because Gabe is laughing back and un-subtly taking pictures for later blackmail. Robbie lets him. He’s not ashamed of how happy he is to be there with him, free and breathing.

It’s not until much later, after dinner but before bedtime, when Gabe is video-chatting his friends and the world is the quiet it only gets on Christmas, when everybody is home and things slide to a stop for a day, that Robbie gets a moment to himself. Standing on the porch in his socks, because it might be December but L.A doesn’t really get freezing, not often, he pulls out his phone and dials her number, not really expecting an answer – it’s late and Christmas, after all. Leaving a voice mail would be good enough.

Daisy picks up on the fourth ring, and he almost drops the phone in shock. Robbie recovers quickly, smirking down the line.

“Cute, real cute.”

“You liked it?” she asks. In her voice, he can hear the excitement and the laughter, but she sounds even more hyperactive than usual, and he figures she’s probably drunk by now. “I knew it. Jemma said it was offensive but I said you’d have to have thick skin by now, what with being set on fire and everything.”

Laughing harder, knowing that Gabe could probably hear him from inside, Robbie bit the sides of his cheeks to hold himself back, but was unable to keep the smile off his face. Only Daisy. He didn’t think anyone else would dare make jokes about it, not yet, or that he’d let them – but her. There wasn’t even a question of if with her: she knew just how to make it feel okay, even if it wasn’t.

The phone is by his ear as he leans against the rails, apron still on his chest. In the background of the call, he can hear talking and music. “I didn’t know to get you anything-”

“I didn’t expect you to!” she says, too quickly and slurred. “I just did it, cos – I saw it, and I thought of you. I thought it would make you laugh. And I like it.”

“Like what?”

“When you laugh,” she says, like it’s obvious. Before he can question it, she barrels right on. “So, how’s your Christmas at home? Is Gabe okay?”

“Yeah. He says thanks for . . . whatever it is that you gave him, by the way. He’s been taking about it with his friend for almost half an hour now.”

“It’s nothing. Just something Fitzsimmons made that I thought could help with him passing all of his classes so he can come and work for me at SHIELD.”

“He’s not coming to work for you,” Robbie says. It’s an old joke. Daisy keeps claiming that one of the Reyes’ boys would end up on her side, as they were both heroes in their own way, while both he and his brother tried to tell her that it wasn’t their style. “Not even a Christmas miracle could manage that, Johnson.”

“Bah humbug,” she says. He can hear her pouting. “You better have saved some Christmas dinner for me.”

“I did,” he promises. “I’ll bring it over in the week. But I _am_ starting to think that you only want me for my culinary skills . . .”

He’s joking, but he almost chokes when she replies. “That, and you’re not bad to look at.”

By the time Robbie is finished choking on his own spit, half-laughing and hearing her do the same, she is shouting at someone on the other end of the phone. Her voice is further away for a moment, before she comes back into sharp sounds, saying quickly, “I gotta go, May and Mack just got into an arm-wrestling contest. I’ve got to place my bets.”

“On who?”

“May, obviously.” Daisy laughs, and he hears he step away from the party for a minute, the sounds getting distant. Her words are for only him, it seems. “Merry Christmas, Robbie. I’m glad you’re here for it.”

He’s dazed enough that he barely manages to reply back. “Merry Christmas, Daisy. I’ll see you soon.”

“Not if I see you first.”

The line clicks off. Robbie is left standing on his porch, closing his eyes briefly with a smile on his face, wondering when this became his life. He’s not supposed to hope for things – he is a weapon, and weapons don’t have emotions – but he hopes that whatever happens next, she’s there.

*

Of course, things fall apart just as fast as they fall together.

Daisy is sitting in her office in late January, nursing her fifth coffee and wondering how much stick she’d get for taking the rest of the day off when her office door swings open. Out of the corner of her eyes she see’s Robbie’s jacket, so doesn’t even look up when he enters, relaxing immediately. It was only Robbie. No one there to say that there was a disaster or ask why the coffee machine was broken again, but Robbie; he was probably there to either drop off food, ask for some help in his night-time job, or ask her to watch Gabe that night while he was out. For someone carrying around a vengeance demon, he often brought peace and a break into her office, not the end of the world.

By now, his presence is common enough in her office that he has his own key-card to get into the base. She flips the paper over, unworried, “One sec, just let me finish this page. It’s going right through me anyways.”

“Daisy.”

The edge to his tone makes her freeze. Over the months he had been back, months they had spent working together or growing together, the way he said her name was softer than it had been before. He said it as a certain thing, but now, it is laced with doubt, hesitant even, and that’s enough for her to know that something is wrong, from a single word.

Closing her eyes for the briefest of moments in pain, she lets the file fall closed in her hands. When she lifts her gaze to meet his – Robbie is looking at her with those big sad eyes, uncertain, fiddling with the chain around his torso, and he looks as if he’s just lost something important – Daisy knows. She knows what’s coming. Like a storm brewing on the horizon that you can’t outrun, she knows that it’s already too late.

“You have to leave, don’t you?”

She can’t look away from him, although she wants to. Robbie nods: not the laughing nod, head thrown back in amusement as he cackled; nor the smug nod when he knew he was right, the incline of his head that made her want to punch him sometimes; nor even the serious, single nod, the one from missions, the soldiers nod despite never having been to war. No, this one is different. It’s crumbling his shoulders and she can see the weight of the world there, lead heavy, and she knows he doesn’t want to go, she can see it, but –

But. He was always leaving, and he could never stay just like she could never leave. It was just a matter of time.

“Okay,” she says, although it is anything but. Daisy stands, careful to keep her face neutral, to not show how desperately she wants him to stay because he can’t and it’s already painful enough. She avoids his eyes the entire time. “Let’s get you downstairs. You can create a portal where you did before.”

“Daisy-”

It’s just her name again, but it cuts through her like a knife.

“I knew you’d have to leave sooner or later; we both did,” she cuts him off too quickly, side-stepping the hand reaching for her arm. Robbie’s gloved hand hangs in midair between them when she stops in the door, and she still can’t bear to look at him, because the pit of dread in her stomach at knowing that she would have to look away eventually might just kill her – but she has survived more than this before, and was still standing. Swallowing hard, she forces her eyes up to his. The smile that touches her lips is longing and sympathetic, all rolled into one. “I’m just sorry that it was sooner.”

He says nothing, doesn’t look like words could even form in his mouth at the moment, so she turns and they walk down through the base in silence. Faces pass, a few people call out to them, but Daisy just shakes her head slightly and silence falls in the corridor: their walk becomes a funeral march. Chin up, eyes down, she walks and feels another chip form in her armour with each step. She doesn’t want to reach their destination. When they do, Robbie is going to vanish again in a heartbeat, leaving nothing behind but a memory and the smell of ash, and she was going to be left wondering if she will ever see him again.

It breaks her heart.

There’s no way around it; he breaks her heart. No matter what they were or could be, he will leave, and she will stay, because it’s in their nature. It’s a battle they can never win; a circle with no end, and hoping for anything more just leaves them – well, it leaves them standing where they were now, in an empty room, staring at the space where the portal will be in minutes, at the ending before it had even begun.

“Daisy-”

“That’s the third time you’ve said my name,” Daisy jumps in with a joke. She tries to smile, to make him laugh, to make this memory a good one in case it is the last, but he just looks sad. It’s unshakeable, it seems, as his eye twitches and his lips clamp shut, the sunshine smile not appearing today, only clouds.

He bites his lip; looks back at her, drinking her in with those eyes. “I know. I just want to – I want to say it while I can. I . . .” he trails off and sighs, gaze becoming frank. “There’s nothing left to say, is there? This is gonna suck no matter what.”

She confirms it with a nod, voice cracking. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

Daisy can feel the ache of sorrow in her veins, threatening to spill over and reveal just how much it hurts to stand there with him and not ask him to stay. Everything is a bit too bright, too loud – the world is cracking apart and nobody but the two of them can see it. She desperately wants to keep him close, so much it aches in her bones to not reach out and grab him and not let go; it _burns_. She feels like she’s burning, like her skin is made of flames, and she wonders if this is how he feels all the time.

Instead of crying or doing something reckless, Daisy surges forward and pulls him into a hug.

Arms locking around his neck, only slightly on her tiptoes so her head is tucked onto his shoulder, Daisy holds him gently and closes her eyes, just for a moment. She wants to have this, just this one thing, this one touch – the future can go to hell, if she can have him for this second. When Robbie’s hands came to rest on her back and his shocked breath at her embrace brushes against her ear, it’s enough. Sparks shoot up her spine and he leans into her slightly, hugging back.

“Take care of yourself, Robbie.”

“I’d tell you to stay out of trouble, but we both know that’s not gonna happen.”

She laughs; feels both of them shake as she chuckles her way through the hug.

It’s sweet and simple, and Daisy forces herself to step away before it’s too long to let go, ducking her head as she does but feeling his eyes on her anyways. Backing away, she gestures towards the space before them, only lifting her eyes up when she hears the swish of the chain in the air – Robbie swings it around, generating sparks as the portal bursts brightly into life before them, but Daisy doesn’t blink. The thought that he could disappear between her blinks was terrifying. He would just be _gone_.

Robbie is too good for that, and it’s like he can read her mind. Just as she worries that this is it, that he’s going to disappear forever without another word, he turns just as he did last time, pausing with one foot in her world to look back at her. It is eternity in a moment.

He nods, just once, like he did before; like some knight off to do battle in a strange land, taking one last glance at what he is going to protect. She returns it, fighting off tears.

This time around, she speaks.

“Come home soon.”

 _Home_.

It’s so small a word, but it means so much. Because of it, there is a smile on Robbie Reyes’ face as he steps through the portal and into the unknown, swallowed up by sparks a moment later. The afterimage of his face is burned into her mind as it fades to nothing, leaving Daisy standing alone in a room with only the memory of him, not knowing when or if he would return. Life is strange in that way. It is not until you lose something that you know what it meant to you, from the pain at its absence, and Daisy finally knows that he was something more than a friend as Robbie Reyes vanishes from view.

It will be okay, she tells herself. She’ll wait. He’ll be back.

If she tries, she can believe it.

Daisy turns and walks away from the door, footsteps heavy, not crying but feeling strangely empty, and does not stop walking until she is standing outside of the base, the last of the day’s sun straining through the clouds to reach her face. She tilts it up and for the first time in years, since the nun’s of st. agnes made her, she prays, but it’s for the devil she knows, and she prays he comes home.

*

For months, there is only darkness and the fire. Robbie is along for the ride.

It blazes inside of his eyelids when he tries to close them, burns his throat out so he can’t even shout _STOP_ , roaring white-hot under his skin, and its hell, it really is – but it’s worth it. He made his deal alone, and it saved people; if the summary of the good he did was saving his brother, and saving Daisy – saving SHIELD – then maybe he did something right. The Rider is an inferno but he is the one holding the matches. Robbie struck them. Now, if watching the following blaze is his job, then he will do it.

Time blurs after a while. Relentlessly, the Rider tears through dimensions that seem to have no end, with a list and a mission to get vengeance for all those who called for it. A part of Robbie tries to believe that it’s right, that it’s justified – on a good day, he can manage it. He learns as he burns, sees the worst of people, but he also sees the scales of the universe that the brand of justice the Rider deals keeps in balance. After what could have been days, could have been weeks, years, or centuries – he loses count of the days, becomes the darkness, embraces it and . . . goes away inside.

In every moment, every day, Robbie is still there – but he fades away, stepping back from his own body. He is a vessel. The Rider hurts, but he does not feel his broken and bleeding hands, he doesn’t have to agonise or doubt anymore – Robbie goes cold, the smoke without the fire, and time lets him bleed into shadows.

Suddenly, there is a sound in the darkness.

It is not the crack or gentle sigh of the fire, or a scream, or plea for mercy; none of the sounds he was used to – it’s a gasp. Just a quiet, pained gasp; the intake of breath of someone in a great deal of pain, but not calling out for help. The sound breaks through the universe he is in, travelling endlessly through time and space, reaching where he believed only the Rider and His victims could tread – it makes it all the way to him, to Robbie, locked inside his own body and then –

He wakes up.

It’s instantaneous: the world snaps back into focus like a rubber band stretched to its limits before breaking, jolting Robbie back into life. Everything that had been numb before – his soul and his heart and the blood in his pumping veins – it stings as he blinks, time rushing back to him, waking from a long sleep. He can see the blood on his own hands and feel how exhausted he is, like he hadn’t slept in a year and then had been hit by a truck, but before he can deal with the panic of being hit with everything all at once – there it is again, the sound that woke him from his sleeping.

The voice gasps a second time, the sound pitiful and echoing in the vast darkness around him, drawing him in, pulling him back. He recognises it, he thinks. Slowly, with a lot of effort as the Rider notices him trying to take back control, Robbie turns towards it. Through the darkness, a crack of light shines in the distance, what could have been a minute or a mile away.

Robbie tries to walk towards it. Even through the mist of memory washing over him and the confusion after months in the darkness, he knows that it is important to get to that voice. He doesn’t know why it’s important, but he can _feel_ it, a physical thing willing his feet to put one in front of the other –

The Rider fights back. Their work is not done; his deal is not satisfied. Robbie’s feet become like dead-weights, anchoring him to the spot and halting his stumbling towards the light – but **_no_** , he thinks. For too long he has let himself be used, and the voice needs him, he knows it. Forcing another step, Robbie fights back against the Rider, resolutely walking towards the ever-distant light.

Each step is a battle. Somehow, Robbie wins.

Reaching the crack, he feels the chain in his hand and doesn’t even realise he has been swinging it until the sparks of the portal dimly light the space around him. He didn’t see the light – he _made_ it. The portal opens to smoke and gunfire; it is not the Rider but Robbie who steps out into it, looking around for the source of the sound.

He sees her across the room, only noticing the building is collapsing when it rumbles beneath his feet, sending tremors down his spine; she is pinned under a piece of rubble, face ashen and eyes closed, still taking those shallow gasps –

**_DAISY_ **

Before that thought even reaches its end, Robbie is running across the room, thinking he is shouting her name. Daisy’s eyes snap open. They find his and widen slightly. As her lips form his name, question in her eyes, he is already grabbing a hold of the concrete pinning her to the ground, cold to the touch even through his gloves. Without the Rider fuelling him, there would be no way for him to lift it. But Daisy is trapped, and Robbie is lifting it with a shout when her scream forces him to stop.

Pausing with confusion, he stops and looks down at her. It is when he turns back to her that he sees the problem: on the underside of the wall crushing her is some kind of pipe – whatever it was, it was embedded into her belly, and as he pulled it out, blood was gushing from the wound. As his mind behinds to scream, Robbie sucks in a breath at the sight, hefting the wall onto his shoulder without shaking it in the injury so he can kneel down next to her.

“Robbie? Is it . . . really you?”

Despite the fear knawing at his insides, he forces a laugh. “Think this is a sweet dream, girl?”

“Asshole,” she replies, although her breath is coming out slowly and making it difficult for her to speak. The edges of her lips still twitch up, though. “It really is . . . you then. Only the real thing could be this annoying.”

“The original and the best,” he forces a smile at her; she gives him one back. It’s tinged red with pink teeth and the sweat on her forehead as he reaches out a hand to tuck it under her ear, hesitating there for just a moment – under his hand, she is real, breathing still – he has to save her. Robbie gives the wound another look and tries not to wince. “You can’t stay here. The building is coming down.”

“I know. I did it.”

“And you didn’t think to get out first?”

She makes a face. “Things didn’t go exactly to plan.”

“Is that the new SHIELD motto?” He is rewarded with the sound of her laugh: the sweetest thing he has heard in months. Its cut short as the movement makes the bar in her stomach shift, turning her smile to tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes, scrunched shut in pain. “Hey, hey, stay with me,” Robbie says quickly, the thumb on her face rubbing against her jawline gently. Her eyes open, filled with pain, and he holds the gaze. “I’m gonna get you out of here, I promise. I can get us back to your base – but this is gonna have to come out, and it’s going to hurt.”

“Do it,” she says through gritted teeth. “My team is all outside, but Jemma is at the base. She can save me.”

Robbie’s hand moves from her face to her shoulder, steadying her. “Ready?”

Daisy nods determinedly. As he lifts the lump of concrete wall above them both, pushing it up from his shoulders and away from them, she screams. It cuts through him like glass. A cloud of dust grows as he throws the wall away; Robbie was kneeling beside her again before it had even settled, hands clamping immediately over the wound. Blood spilled out from underneath his slipping fingers, as her own hands joined him, holding her own blood in, and he is reminded starkly that above all other things, Daisy is a survivor.

“Make the portal,” she instructs, lifting her eyes from all that red to his. “I got this. Do it, Robbie.” Then, more quietly as he stood, she adds, “Quickly.”

There’s fear in her tone as she says it. Time is running out as fast as her blood is seeping through her closed hands. If the sparks flying out of the portal from how furiously Robbie is swinging his chain are burning brighter than usual, he doesn’t notice, only breathes with relief when the brick walls of the SHIELD base come into view a moment later. Turning, he scoops Daisy up as gently as he can, holding her by the knees and back as he carries her through the spinning circle of light. Although her hands are still clamped on her stomach, she curls into him so as not to fall.

“I got you, girl. You’re going to be fine,” he tells her, barely a whisper, trying to keep her there and keep himself from reeling. Robbie stalks through the base until he finds the med-bay and after that it all begins to blur again, as there is a lot of shouting and Daisy is taken away on a gurney, she slips from view and he sits on a hard plastic chair outside the operating room, left staring at the blood on his hands.

Robbie stays there for a long time.

Eventually, Doctor Simmons comes out and tells him that Daisy is stable. The rush of air that comes out of his lungs with relief could have rivalled a hurricane. He puts his head in his hands and feels his face crack with relief, muttering a prayer in Spanish his mother used to say before looking back up at Jemma; she is crying too, matching his relief and patting him on the shoulder.

“You got her home,” she says, “Thank you, Robbie.”

Even though she won’t understand, he shakes his head at that. “It’s the other way around.”

She lets him go and sit with Daisy, but only after he’s taken a shower in the SHIELD locker-room and washed all the blood off his hands. The front of his jacket is stained, too, so for the first time in an age, Robbie takes it off. He hangs it by the door, goose-bumps prickling along his exposed arms as he walks over to the bedside. She looks peaceful. It’s odd, but she could just be sleeping, lying there without the frown lines between her eyes and the weight on her shoulders, if not for the beeping of machines and clinical smell of a hospital all around them. Although he knows that she will not wake for hours, Robbie takes a new seat beside her beside, leaning back and watching her rest and thankful to see the rise and fall of her chest – she was alive. Maybe not okay, but alive, and that was something worth being thankful for.

At some point, he falls asleep. He has been a dead man walking for too long, and slips off even amid the constant visits from the doctors and her team and how uncomfortable hospitals make him feel, falling asleep right there in the chair, neck rolling back against his shoulders. Thankfully, the sleep is dreamless. The last thing he see’s before he drops off is that she is safe, and the first thing to wake him is the sound of her voice; it’s not a bad way to sleep, he thinks to himself as he wakes with a smile.

“Hey,” she says, looking over at him, nestled in pillows.

“Hey,” he smiles back. It’s almost an instinct now, to smile when he sees her. Leaning forwards in his seat, Robbie holds his hands together and asks gently, “How are you feeling?”

“Crappy, but I’m not dead, so we’ll count it as a win. Plus,” she hesitates, tilts her head towards him. “You’re back. So it’s a double-win.” Just as Robbie feels himself flush, just as he’s about to make a joke about her missing him, just as he really thinks he might love this girl – a devilish smirk appears on her lips, and she sends it right in his direction. “And, I get hospital jell-o now. Score!”

Just thinking about the amount of sugar and preservatives in that stuff almost gave Robbie a heart attack. It must have showed on his face because a second later she is laughing, and it’s weak and she winces when she moves too much, but she’s laughing, and he follows suit a moment after.

After years of feeling nothing, it slams into him so fiercely it could have knocked Robbie off his feet if he were standing: Daisy Johnson was the light, and he thinks that he could love her. It scares him shitless and makes him question if it’s worth even hoping for, of course, and it’s too much to do anything about today – but that tug in his stomach when he thought he might lose her, he can’t ignore. The way it did flips at her laughter only confirmed his suspicions.

But they have time – an indefinite amount, but he isn’t going anywhere until she is well – and for now, he is content to just sit with her and laugh, keeping the feeling to himself.

*

There’s a couple of limply inflated red balloons and a banner reading ‘WELCOME HOME ROBBIE’ and Daisy frowns looking at them, the sad little party she was throwing, wishing she could have done more. But the short notice and the fact that she had been in hospital until a week ago had really put a strain on her party-throwing skills. Jemma had helped her to make the banner two days ago and was going to come over with some of the team later, but for now it was only Daisy and Gabe in the Reyes’ household, awaiting the return of its most hot-headed resident.

“How’s it coming?” Gabe asks, wheeling himself into the crowded kitchen. When his eyes pass over the neon-coloured banner, complete with glitter, they widen slightly, but he tactfully chooses to say nothing.

“Pitiful.”

She pouts from her crossed-arm position inspecting the decorations, but glances over to Gabe to gage his reaction. When she had pitched throwing Robbie a homecoming party, he had been sceptical, but had been smiling knowingly by the end of her speech (which totally, definitely wasn’t rehearsed). After suffering the look for a whole minute, she had snapped and told him to wipe it off his face or to explain it. Gabe had chosen the latter.

“It’s just nice to see someone looking out for Robbie,” he had smiled, face anything but innocent. “After he’s spent all of his life looking after me, I mean. It’s good to know you care about him so much.”

“I-” Daisy had felt vaguely insulted by that comment, but could find no actual fault in the words. She _did_ care about Robbie now. To deny it would be a lie. “Stop smirking, kiddo. I know what you’re getting at and I’m _not_ getting any – I didn’t mean it like that! Shit. Wait, Gabe, don’t tell your brother I said that – Gabe. Gabe!”

But by that time he had wheeled himself off, snickering, and leaving Daisy wishing that she knew when to stop talking. Ever. In her entire life.

Now, he was being genuinely nice instead of little-brother smug, looking at her admittedly shitty decorations. “It looks great, Daisy.”

“Didn’t your brother ever tell you not to lie?”

“All the time. But, he also became a vengeance soul-sharing vigilante and didn’t tell me, so I think calling _me_ out for lying now would be a bit hypocritical,” Gabe tilts his head to one side at that, and she can still read the line of resentment in his jaw. They’re getting better, though, and she knows that Gabe is as happy to have Robbie back as she is. Then, as she watches him, he catches himself with a wide, fake grin, “- Not that I’m lying! The decorations are,” he pokes one of the balloons, and it flops down a few feet, “awesome.”

Daisy had to laugh at that, ducking her head and shaking it slightly at the state of the balloons she’d found at the base. She thinks they were from Mack’ last birthday, having found them in the back of the office supplies box, full of pens and broken staplers, and she hopes that they were unused before they went into the box, and not floating bags of spit she’d brought to the party. She sighed.

“I wonder if this is what hell looks like. We can ask Robbie when he gets here.”

A voice calls from the next room. “Ask me what when I get here?”

Despite the fact that she was a trained SHIELD agent, with over two years of field experience, including time as a would-be superhero, Daisy yelped at the sound of Robbie’s voice and the jingle of his keys in the lock. He was home early. In a state of total panic, her eyes flicked to Gabe, who was sitting motionless and apparently in a state of similar shock, both of them staring at the currently empty doorframe, soon to be occupied by one Robbie Reyes, of course arriving too early to his own damn surprise party.

Later, she would tell people that when asked to think of a moment of pure panic, that was the moment Daisy chose to talk about: not her father or her mother, not terragenesis, not seeing HIVE, not knowing Lincoln was in the atmosphere and out of her reach to save. Those were painful moments, sad moments. Lingering on them helped no one, left her standing in shadow, left her thinking that hoping for a better future was a selfish thing, with a guilt so great it could easily overwhelm her – no, she chose to think of happier moments, when she spoke about her life later. For panic; it was standing in the Reyes kitchen and hearing Robbie come home early, and it draws a smile to her face instead of tears.

Naturally, Daisy panics as his dark hair appears around the corner, head down, not having seen the decorations yet and knowing that she has to do _something_ , she has to distract him –

She kisses him.

It’s probably not the best idea but it’s the first one that springs to mind, as he steps over the threshold and begins to look up - so to hide their party, Daisy runs three steps across the kitchen and grabs him by the collar and before it has even fully caught up to her what she has done, her lips are on his.

Robbie makes a little surprised noise. It’s almost cute, as he freezes just as her brain is going _holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit_ \- and that little sound of shock at the back of his throat curves her own lips into a smile. It’s when he kisses her back that Daisy almost drops down dead on the spot. She hadn’t expected _that_ , nor the way his hands instinctively fell to her back, pulling her closer, or the way her head goes light at the feeling of kissing Robbie Reyes.

It was all so unexpected, the feeling that this was right somehow and that she should have done this long ago, that Daisy entirely forgets that she is supposed to be distracting him. The hand behind her back that had been waving for Gabe to hide the party fell slack at first, before she brought it up to his head as Robbie responded, resting at the crook of his jaw, just the barest hint of stubble scratching at her fingertips –

Gabe clears his throat, loudly.

Daisy and Robbie jump about a foot away from each other. Her eyes snap around to find Gabe, sitting in front of the table, looking between the pair of them with an utterly unimpressed and yet somehow smug look on his face. She feels the blood rush to her cheeks, as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, glancing over to Robbie, who had the shell-shocked glaze over his eyes of someone who had just had an immense shock – only to see them narrow as he notices the banner and decorations. When his eyes flick back to her, almost bashfully flicking from her face to the ground with embarrassment, Daisy forces a slightly grim but still flushed smile onto her lips.

“Well,” she says aloud, “so much for my distraction.”

Gabe adds, splaying his hands sarcastically. “Surprise!”

Robbie chokes on his laughter. The smile bubbles out on his face, breaking through the shock, as he looks around the mediocre-ly decorated kitchen with wide eyes. Stumbling a few steps forward, he looks at the balloons and the banner, but it’s with wonder. Daisy watches for his reaction, and notices how he looks at the simple things in a way she couldn’t see them, like her shitty half-deflated balloons were something amazing, and she thinks that she would like to see the world through his eyes, just for a moment. He looks . . . as strange as it was, Robbie looked _happy_.

“Wow,” he breaths softly, pausing to look between Daisy and Gabe. “You did this?”

“Technically, Daisy bribed me into letting her throw a party in the house.”

At Gabe’s joke, because really, hacking into his school to find the exam papers and spread them around the students was an _honour_ to her, not a bribe, Robbie turns his eyes swiftly to her. Daisy feels the weight of them now. Robbie is looking at her the same way he looked at the shitty decorations. Like she was something amazing.

“There is one more thing,” she says. It gives her lips something other to do than kiss him again. Crossing over to the fridge, Daisy pulls out a plate – “I made this, so it might not be so great, but I am like, ninety to one hundred percent sure it won’t give us food poisoning, so.” She puts the lopsided, slightly burnt but covered with red icing cake down on the table, turning to him with a grin. “Ta-da!”

Written on top of the cake in neon green icing, slightly veering off on each word, was the phrase: WELCOME HOME HOT-STUFF! Surrounded by small sugar skulls Jemma had made, which were altogether neater and more put-together, a few fireballs of orange icing that Gabe had done, and overall, it wasn’t the perfect cake, but Daisy liked to think they’d done okay.

Trying to sell the mess of a cake, she went on. “We bought one of those sparkler-candles too, but since you’re home early there wasn’t time to put it on, and-”

“It’s perfect,” Robbie cuts her off. To her surprise, when she looks back at him, the edges of his lips are soft and tilted upwards, and he is nodding at the cake. As if feeling her eyes on him, Robbie chooses that exact moment to turn his eyes on her – “it’s perfect, Daisy. I don’t know how to thank you for doing this.”

She cocks an eyebrow, leans into him as she smirks, “I can think of one or two ways you could thank me.”

“Ugh, get a room,” Gabe says, again raising his voice. Poor kid looks traumatised, as both Daisy and Robbie turn to tell him to shut it, grinning when the words come out of their mouths at the same time. Daisy laughs hard, caught in Robbie’s eyes, and she thinks that this might be something worth hoping for. That maybe, this time, things could work out for the best. Noticing their distraction, Gabe leaves the room quietly, muttering to himself about his dumb brother and oblivious idiots and _Jesus Christ, am I going to have to live with them like this now?_

Daisy and Robbie are too busy trying not to blush too hard while standing so close to notice his exit. Robbie breaks the silence first.

“So . . .”

Daisy matches the tilt of his head and the tone of his voice. “So.”

“Your, um, distraction technique. It was . . .”

Her tongue pokes out the corner of her mouth, as Daisy teases, “Come on, Reyes. Use your words.”

The expression she gets in response to that is both frustrated and fond, so Daisy counts it as a victory.

“I – you are something else, girl. But I like it. I like _you_ , and I know what our lives are like and that I shouldn’t be hoping for anything,” he bites the inside of his cheek; she can see it through his skin, the tense set of his jaw giving away a lot about what it is like to desperately hope. It is a feeling she understands. “But I would like to see what this is between us. Okay?”

In response, she leans forward and kisses him again.

*

Sun beats down on his back, and Robbie smiles at the sensation. It’s a simple pleasure. So is sitting at the waterfront with Daisy, carefully perching on the hood of the Charger, with the smell of her apple shampoo lingering in the air from where she is tucked up beside him, eyes on the sky. As usual, he is watching her.

She’s his girl, and he loves her, although he hasn’t had the nerve to say it yet.

He’s thinking about it, though. Every time he has seen her in the past two months, he has played with the idea of dropping it into conversation casually instead of making it a big deal – not because he doesn’t think she’s worth the emotional weight of it, but because it is a big thing and he doesn’t want to give her anything else to carry – but he wants her to know, too. That she is loved, deeply and honestly. She turns to smile at him, and he almost says it right then.

“What would you say if I asked you to take a trip with me?” he says instead. “‘Cause I’ve been thinking that I’ve seen more of other worlds than I have this one, and it might be nice to take a few days off. We both deserve a break.”

Daisy hums in agreement at that. It had been a hectic through weeks at SHIELD – Coulson showed up again with a story about space, and she had promptly resigned as director and left someone else to deal with that mess, after yelling at Coulson for vanishing for almost an hour. Really, she was glad the weight of her job was gone and he was back and she wouldn’t miss the paperwork for sure, was the way she told it to him afterwards.

She asks instead, “Where?”

“Anywhere. Wherever you want.”

Robbie thinks he said that a little too fast, and his real meaning was hidden in there somewhere. The smile she gave him confirmed it. She knew he loved her, and the world didn’t end. It was still strange to have so much hope.

“Fitz-Simmons is always talking about Britain like it’s cool,” she suggests, dropping her head back against his collarbone, “we could try and find Hogwarts.”

He laughs at that, but is cut off from answering by her phone. It beeps twice in her pocket; by now, he knows the SHIELD signals and code by the back of his hand, and knows it’s an all-hands-on-deck agent call-in. The laughter turns into a sigh as she groans in turn, sagging into his chest tiredly. For a moment, she just stays there. Robbie knows – really, he understands – that Daisy will always be a part of SHIELD and that it was like her beating heart, but he wonders for a second if she’s just going to lie there with him and tell the world to go to hell.

But she is a better person than he is, so of course she doesn’t.

“I should go,” she says, pushing herself up. “They’ll only keep ringing if I don’t.”

Daisy slides off the bonnet of the car and he follows her, catching her by the wrist and grinning as he spins her around, right back into him, her hip knocking into his. There’s a smile on her face as he kisses her, leaning against the car, and everything is warm and perfect and sun-kissed; as she pulls away and all he can see is the sun reflected in her brown eyes, and he loves her.

“I’ll be here when you get back. Dinner at 6, don’t forget. I’ll make your favourite.”

“I’ll be there,” she promises.

“Then go save the world.”

Despite the eye-roll that earns him, he also knows that she is starting to believe it, that she is a hero. Robbie watches her go, nodding as she begins to walk away. He is glad she walked into his life and things got crazier then, but they also got better. Most of all he is so, so glad she made him hope again. As he rides the Charger into the sunset, Robbie finds that there is a smile on his face: whatever the future had planned, whatever they faced, his plan was always to stay by her side as long as he could, and that is enough for him.

Loving her was worth waiting for. Good and bad, laughter or tears, he was with her. And that was something.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Robert Frost. also my first time writing both aos and quakerider, so any helpful tips and comments are appreciated!


End file.
